What an aerial photograph taken on 16 July 1989 revealed was a series of cropmarks, the subtle discolouration of growing crops caused by buried ditches, known as fosses, altering how plants draw moisture from the soil above them. The pattern they traced was not the rigid geometry of later land division but something older and more organic, a field system built around curvilinear boundaries that curve and follow the contours of the ground rather than cutting across them in straight lines.

The photograph, catalogued as GB89.AD.19, shows that this field system does not sit in isolation. It runs directly alongside a possible enclosure to the south-south-west, the two features appearing to share or abut the same boundaries, suggesting they were part of the same landscape at the same period of use. A second enclosure lies roughly 100 metres further to the south-south-west, hinting at a small cluster of related activity in this part of Tipperary. Enclosures of this kind in an Irish context are often associated with early medieval settlement, typically a circular or oval bank and fosse defining a farmstead or family territory, though without excavation the precise date and function of these particular features remains unconfirmed. The curvilinear character of the field system fits broadly within that tradition, where agricultural plots were laid out in relation to a central habitation rather than imposed across an open landscape.