The boundaries were only identified in November 1987, when aerial reconnaissance picked out their lines against the surface of the land, a reminder that the Irish countryside still gives up its older shapes slowly, and often only when the light and season are exactly right.

What the aerial survey revealed was a series of field boundaries radiating outward from a rath, the kind of circular earthen enclosure that served as a defended farmstead for much of the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The boundaries themselves are modest in scale, built from banks of earth and stone about two metres wide and only around thirty centimetres high, the sort of feature that would read as little more than a slight rise underfoot. One bank extends from the south-west side of the rath and runs southward for approximately sixty metres. Another leaves from the north-west and runs in that direction for around thirty metres before meeting a further boundary, which itself extends some forty metres to the west and a hundred metres to the north-east. Together these fragments suggest an organised working landscape arranged around the rath, with the enclosure at its functional centre and the fields fanning out from it. Whether the full system survives beneath later land use, or whether these are remnants of something once much larger, the evidence does not say for certain.