It was not excavated, not stumbled upon by a walker, and not turned up by a plough. It was spotted from space.

The enclosure measures roughly 32 metres north to south and 37 metres east to west, making it a substantial feature by any reckoning. It is defined by a fosse, a cut ditch that would originally have enclosed the interior, and which survives as a buried void in the soil. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the site lay under woodland, which both concealed and, in a sense, protected it. When the land was eventually cleared and returned to agricultural use, the buried ditch began to influence how crops grew directly above it, retaining slightly different moisture levels than the surrounding soil. On 17 June 2017, those subtle differences showed up as a cropmark in Google Earth Pro satellite imagery, and it was Jean-Charles Caillère who recognised the roughly circular outline for what it was. Cropmarks are among the quieter tools of landscape archaeology; from ground level there is often nothing to see, but from altitude, and under the right growing conditions, the ghost of a ditch or wall foundation can briefly declare itself in the colour and height of a crop.

Without excavation, the enclosure's date and precise function remain open questions. Circular enclosed features of this kind appear across Ireland in contexts ranging from the early medieval period back to prehistory, sometimes associated with settlement, sometimes with ritual or funerary use. For now, this one remains a shape in a field, known only from a satellite image taken on a June afternoon.