The ground itself gives it away, if you know what to read: a slight but deliberate rise along the southern and eastern edges, a subtle depression running along the west, and the faint ghost of a water channel that once moved with purpose across this old flood plain.

The site at Friarsfield is a roughly rectangular enclosure, measuring approximately 22 metres east to west and 19 metres north to south. It is defined by an earthen bank along its southern and eastern sides, with a scarp, a sharp natural or cut slope, marking the western boundary. That western scarp appears to form the eastern edge of a leat, a managed channel designed to carry water, perhaps to power a mill or drain surrounding land. An outer fosse, essentially a wide shallow ditch, reinforces the eastern and southern perimeter. Inside the enclosure, set slightly off-centre towards the north, are the low remains of a rectangular building, its foundations reduced to barely visible humps in the ground. The name Friarsfield hints at ecclesiastical associations, and a managed enclosure of this kind, set on low-lying ground near a water channel, would not be out of place in a monastic or post-monastic agricultural context, though the record does not make that connection explicit.

The earthworks are subtle enough that a casual visitor might walk across the site without registering it. The bank reaches only about half a metre above the exterior ground surface at its highest point, and the interior is barely raised at all. The leat to the west is similarly unassuming, just six metres wide and a quarter of a metre deep. It is the kind of place where the landscape only begins to make sense once you know what shaped it.