It appears on no historic Ordnance Survey Ireland maps, and for a long time there was simply no official trace of it at all. What eventually gave it away was not the ground itself but the crops growing above it, their roots responding to buried disturbance in ways that become briefly readable from the air.

The enclosure came to light during an aerial photographic survey of the Bruff area in 1986, when a roughly circular cropmark was spotted and catalogued. A cropmark of this kind forms when a buried feature, such as a ditch or fosse, retains moisture differently from the surrounding soil, causing the vegetation above it to grow at a slightly different rate or colour, a difference invisible from the ground but legible from altitude under the right conditions. The circular form here is defined by a fosse, the term used in Irish archaeology for a ditch that typically surrounded a settlement or enclosure. The site sits in reclaimed pasture just north of a field boundary running northeast to southwest, and it is not alone in the landscape. Another enclosure lies roughly 55 metres to the southwest, and a ringfort, a circular earthwork enclosure of early medieval date, sits about 145 metres to the northeast. That cluster of related features in a small area suggests the landscape around Kildromin was organised and occupied over a long period. A field boundary that post-dates 1700 now cuts across the enclosure at its southeastern side, which is part of why the original form is difficult to read at ground level.

The enclosure remains visible, in the clearest sense of that word, on aerial orthophotos captured by Ordnance Survey Ireland between 2005 and 2012, and on a Google Earth image dated September 2020. For anyone visiting, there is little to see from the roadside or on foot across the pasture; the fosse is not an upstanding earthwork but a buried one, and the circular shape only resolves properly when viewed from above. The most practical way to observe it is through those satellite and aerial image platforms. The site was compiled and uploaded to the archaeological record by Martin Fitzpatrick in March 2021, meaning its formal documentation is quite recent, which is itself a reminder of how much of Ireland's archaeological landscape is still being identified, often not by excavation but by looking carefully at what the land reveals from a different angle.