What looks like ordinary farmland at ground level reveals, when viewed from above, the ghostly outline of a curvilinear enclosure, visible only as a cropmark. Cropmarks form when buried features such as ditches or banks affect the moisture and nutrients available to surface vegetation, causing crops to grow differently over the hidden lines below. In this case, the enclosure is defined by a fosse, a term for a ditch typically dug as a boundary or defensive feature around a settlement or ritual space.

The enclosure does not sit in isolation. An aerial photograph records not only this feature but also a large contiguous curvilinear enclosure immediately to the south-west, the two forms pressing against one another across the Tipperary farmland. Further south, at roughly 100 metres and 190 metres respectively, lie another enclosure and a set of earthworks, suggesting that this particular corner of the landscape was once far more intensively organised than its current appearance suggests. Clusters of enclosures like this are not uncommon in the Irish midlands and south, where ringforts and related enclosed settlements were built throughout the early medieval period, though the precise date and function of the Dogstown examples are not recorded.