The only way to see it is from above, and even then only under the right conditions: it appears as a cropmark, the kind of faint discolouration in growing vegetation that betrays buried features beneath the soil. A fosse, essentially a ditch, defines a small oval outline roughly 25 metres along its longer axis and 18 metres across. At that scale it would have enclosed a modest but deliberate space, the sort of dimensions associated with a small enclosure of early medieval date, though without excavation its age and purpose remain open questions.

The site at Cooladine was first reported by Simon Dowling, who identified it from satellite imagery on Google Earth, where the cropmark became legible on imagery dated 14 July 2018. Cropmarks form when buried ditches or banks cause the vegetation above them to grow differently from the surrounding soil, often becoming visible only in dry summers when water stress heightens the contrast between disturbed and undisturbed ground. That this enclosure is detectable only from satellite imagery, and only on a single dated image, says something about how many similar features may exist across the Irish countryside without anyone yet having noticed them.