In July 1989, aerial photography captured a cropmark revealing the fosse, a defensive ditch, of an oval enclosure roughly 50 metres in diameter. Cropmarks form when buried features like ditches or walls affect how crops grow above them, producing variations in colour and height that become readable from altitude but are essentially invisible at ground level. What the camera caught was the faint signature of a structure that had long since been levelled into the landscape.

The enclosure appears to have had an entrance to the south-east, a common orientation in Irish prehistoric and early medieval enclosures, possibly aligned with the rising sun or simply reflecting practical considerations of shelter and access. A second circular enclosure lies roughly 120 metres to the south-south-east, hinting that this corner of north Cork was once a more populated or organised place than the quiet fields now suggest. Without excavation it is difficult to say much more about date or function; such enclosures in Ireland range from Bronze Age ceremonial sites to early medieval farmsteads, and the cropmark alone cannot settle the question.