An aerial photograph taken on 16 July 1989 revealed a cropmark, the kind of ghostly outline that shows up in dry summers when buried features affect how crops grow above them, tracing what appears to be a curvilinear enclosure defined by a fosse, a term for a ditch cut into the earth, often used in early medieval Ireland to demarcate a settlement or enclosure of some significance.

The ambiguity here is the point. Barrett's 2009 analysis notes that the circular form, while consistent with the type of enclosed settlement that dots the Irish archaeological record, sits within a landscape that also contains at least two similar features nearby, one roughly 340 metres to the south-southwest and another about 240 metres to the west-southwest. The clustering of these forms raises the possibility that all of them, including the apparent enclosure, are simply the remnants of natural ponds rather than deliberate human construction. A fosse and a silted-up hollow can look remarkably alike from altitude, and aerial photography, for all its revelatory power, cannot always settle the matter on its own.