What appears at ground level as a faint arc of different vegetation turns out, on closer inspection, to be the ghost of a complex of concentric enclosures, one nested inside another, each circle belonging to a different phase or function of ancient occupation.

The innermost feature is a circular rath, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, typically defined by an earthen bank and surrounding ditch. At Kilmurry, the central rath measures roughly 22 metres in diameter, ringed by a bank some six metres wide and an outer fosse, or ditch, approximately twelve metres across at the top. That much was recorded in 1940 from the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of that edition, where the whole cluster appeared as a single hachured feature of about 45 metres in overall diameter. What the mapmakers could not see, and what aerial photography later revealed, is that this inner enclosure sits within a much larger outer ring, roughly 100 metres in diameter. More unusual still, a D-shaped enclosure, approximately 30 metres across in both directions and with a straight edge to the north, overlies the eastern side of that outer ring, suggesting the site was reused or extended at a different point in time. The inner enclosure shows as a cropmark, the kind of subtle difference in crop colour or growth that betrays buried ditches and banks to a camera looking straight down, and as a vegetation arc visible at the surface running roughly north-west to east over a circuit of about 30 metres.

The site sits on relatively level, low ground, which makes it easy to overlook from any nearby road or field boundary. The concentric arrangement, a smaller rath enclosed within a much wider outer ring, is not unheard of in Irish archaeology, but the addition of the D-shaped feature on the eastern side gives Kilmurry a slightly awkward, accumulated quality, as though different generations kept returning to the same patch of ground and adding their own boundary to whatever was already there. The outer enclosure and the D-shaped feature were confirmed again on aerial photographs from the 1950s, the Ordnance Survey Ireland series from 2005, and on Google Earth imagery from July 2018.