It exists, at least to the eye, only from the air. When crops grow over the site, the buried ditches of the enclosure cause the plants above them to ripen or wither at a slightly different rate, producing ghostly rings and arcs that become legible in aerial photographs. What those photographs reveal is a bivallate ringfort, meaning one enclosed by two concentric ditches rather than the more common single ring, with an internal diameter of roughly 25 metres and an outer diameter of around 35 metres.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when their boundaries were earthen rather than stone, were the typical enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, broadly spanning the period from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across the country in various states of preservation, though a significant number, like this one at Butlerstown, have been levelled by centuries of agriculture and survive only as buried features. This particular site sits on a gentle south-east facing slope, with the shore of Lady's Island Lough lying about 100 metres to the south-east. Traces of a regular field system have also been recorded nearby, suggesting that the surrounding landscape was organised and worked in a pattern that may itself be of considerable antiquity.

Because the site leaves no surface trace in a root crop, a visitor walking the land would have no sense of what lies beneath. The bivallate plan, the two fosses or ditches encircling whatever domestic or agricultural activity once took place inside, survives as a shadow in the soil rather than as anything you could point to or photograph from the ground.