The only way to see them is from the air, where the buried archaeology betrays itself as cropmarks, the faint discolouration that occurs when soil disturbance beneath a field causes crops overhead to grow unevenly, producing ghostly rings and arcs visible only at the right angle and the right time of year.

The complex at Ballymacadam was identified from an aerial photograph taken in August 1996. It includes a large circular cropmark and an ancillary cropmark sitting in fairly flat terrain that slopes very gently northward. To the north-west, one circular feature turns out to have a more prosaic explanation: a natural hill rather than a buried structure, though it carries its own curiosity on top. A carved pillar-stone sits at its summit, erected as a memorial to Daniel O'Connell, the nineteenth-century lawyer and political organiser who led the campaign for Catholic Emancipation, the movement that secured the right of Catholics in Ireland and Britain to sit in Parliament and hold public office. The juxtaposition is quietly odd: a commemoration of one of Ireland's most celebrated political figures sitting atop what, from the air, looks indistinguishable from the prehistoric archaeology scattered around it.

The enclosures themselves remain unexcavated and unconfirmed in terms of date or function, their circular forms suggesting the kind of enclosed settlement that appears repeatedly across the Irish landscape from the prehistoric period onward. Because they produce no surface trace, there is nothing to see at ground level beyond the field itself and the low hill to the north-west with its carved stone.