An aerial photograph taken on 16 July 1989 captured what archaeologists call a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried features such as ditches or walls affect the growth of crops above them, producing subtle variations in colour and height that are invisible at ground level but can be read clearly from above. What the photograph revealed was the outline of a curvilinear enclosure, roughly circular in form and defined by a fosse, which is a ditch dug to demarcate or defend a boundary. The enclosure is incomplete in the cropmark, meaning either that part of it was never finished, or that the surviving trace has been obscured by later agricultural activity.

A second possible enclosure lies approximately 50 metres to the north-east, and to the north of that there are traces of what may be an associated field system. Curvilinear enclosures of this type are found widely across Ireland and are often associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation it is difficult to assign a date or function to any particular example. They could represent the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, or something older entirely. The clustering of the two possible enclosures and the field system suggests that this corner of Tipperary was once a managed, inhabited landscape, its organisation now recoverable only in fragments.