There is no earthwork, no stone, no depression in the soil to suggest that anything unusual is present. The only reason these circular features are known at all is that they were caught on camera from the air, their shapes betraying themselves through the uneven growth of crops above them.

The technique that revealed them is known as cropmark analysis. When buried ditches or banks lie beneath agricultural land, the soil above them retains moisture and nutrients differently from the undisturbed ground nearby, causing the crops to grow at slightly different rates. From altitude, and at the right time of year, these variations in growth produce faint but legible patterns. Aerial photographs taken on 3 August 1996 showed a large, roughly circular enclosure on this gentle slope just below the crest of a hill, with a smaller circular enclosure pressing in on its western side, and a third, smaller possible cropmark sitting to the north-east of the main feature. That north-eastern mark may represent an annexe attached to the larger enclosure, or it could be the remains of an entirely separate and perhaps earlier monument. The relationship between the three shapes has not been resolved.

Enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological forms in Ireland, used across a very long span of time for purposes ranging from settlement and farming to ritual. Without excavation, it is impossible to say what period these particular features belong to, or what they once contained. For now, they remain known only as cropmarks, three circular ghosts in a Tipperary field.