The patterns appear in satellite imagery as the ghosts of a settlement, where differences in crop growth betray the buried outlines of structures and boundaries that have otherwise left no mark on the landscape a person walking through it would notice.

The site was identified and reported by Jean-Charles Caillère, who recognised in satellite imagery a complex of possible house sites, small haggards (the enclosed yards typically found beside a farmhouse for storing hay and grain), and larger field systems spread across a raised area on a north-south ridge. That raised ground corresponds closely to a roughly curvilinear enclosure measuring approximately 250 metres north to south and 240 metres east to west, visible on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map. Immediately to the south-west of this enclosure lies Quinagh Graveyard, and the relationship between the two is suggestive. No church survives at the site, and no physical trace of one has been recorded, but the burial ground's position adjacent to the settlement cropmarks points strongly towards there having been one. Cropmarks extend roughly 60 metres west and 170 metres south of the graveyard itself, suggesting the community associated with this place was considerably larger than the surviving cemetery boundary might imply. It is a familiar pattern in the Irish landscape: the dead outlast the living, the graveyard persists long after the church has gone, and the settlement quietly dissolves back into the earth, waiting for the right angle of light and a dry summer to make itself known again.