It was a chance aerial photograph taken in July 1970, part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, that first brought this site to attention, preserving a moment when the buried archaeology briefly surfaced as a cropmark, a phenomenon that occurs when differential soil moisture causes crops above buried ditches or walls to grow at a slightly different rate, producing visible patterns from altitude that leave no trace whatsoever on the ground.

The enclosure is large and irregular in shape, which already sets it apart from the more geometrically tidy ringforts common across the Irish midlands and south. The aerial image revealed a double fosse on the western side, a fosse being a defensive ditch typically dug to reinforce the perimeter of an enclosure, and the inner fosse appears to kink, or change direction, on the eastern side. That internal deviation is quietly odd, suggesting either a deliberate design feature or a later modification to the original layout. A second cropmark extends southward from the enclosure, hinting that whatever activity once centred here was not confined to the main structure. The site lies to the south of the Clonmel to Waterford railway line, a corridor of landscape that has been shaped and reshaped by successive waves of industry and infrastructure.

The enclosure now sits within the grounds of the Merck, Sharp and Dohme plant at Ballydine, and an access road has been built across it, further disturbing a site that was already known only through cropmark evidence rather than excavation. What it was, and when it was built, remains an open question.