It does not appear on any Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps. What finally brought it to light was not a dig or a local tradition but a single aerial photograph taken during the Bruff aerial photographic survey in 1986, catalogued as Bruff 228. From the air, the ground told a different story.

What the survey revealed is a subrectangular earthwork, roughly 31 metres on its longer north-north-west to south-south-east axis and 22 metres across. Its eastern and southern edges follow the natural angle of a floodplain scarp, the kind of low step in the land that forms where a river's floodplain meets slightly higher ground, and which would have offered a ready-made boundary to whoever shaped this enclosure. A curvilinear scarp, curving rather than straight in plan, completes the enclosure from the south-west around through west and north to north-east. The monument sits just 15 metres east of the River Mahore, which at this point also serves as a townland boundary between Ballynamona and Gortacloona, and 115 metres south of a confluence with the Ballynamona River. Its placement in a bend of water, between two rivers, is not accidental looking. Two ringforts, the circular earthwork enclosures most commonly associated with early medieval farming settlement in Ireland, lie within 135 metres to the north and south respectively, suggesting this was a landscape with considerable activity across time, even if the enclosure's own date and function remain unassigned.

The earthwork is on private farmland and not formally accessible to visitors. Its presence is confirmed across several orthoimage datasets, including OSi images taken between 2005 and 2012, a Digital Globe image from 2011 to 2013, and a Google Earth image from March 2017, all of which show the same subrectangular form in the pasture. Those with a particular interest in aerial archaeology or crop-mark monuments may find the published Bruff survey imagery, referenced as AP 5/2016, the most practical way to examine the site. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded to the national monuments database in November 2020.