There is nothing to see from the ground, no earthwork, no ridge, no trace of a boundary. The only evidence that anything is there at all comes from the air, where differences in how crops grow over buried features betray the outlines of what lies beneath. These are cropmarks, a phenomenon where buried ditches or walls affect the moisture and nutrients available to plants growing above them, causing slight but detectable variations in colour and height that become legible from altitude, particularly during dry summers when the contrast is most pronounced.

Aerial photographs taken in August 1996 revealed three such marks on a gentle south-facing slope just below the crest of a hill at Ballyboe. The dominant feature is a large, roughly circular enclosure, accompanied by a smaller circular enclosure that partially overlaps its western side. A third, smaller mark adjoins the north-east quadrant of the larger enclosure and may represent either an annexe attached to it or the remnant of an earlier, separate monument altogether. Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological forms in Ireland, used across many centuries for purposes ranging from settlement and farmsteads to ritual and burial, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say which function applied in any given case. The overlapping relationship between the two main enclosures here, and the ambiguous status of the third mark, suggests a site with some complexity, possibly multiple phases of use rather than a single moment of construction.