The site is invisible to anyone walking the land, but from the air, under the right conditions of dry summer weather, a curving cropmark reveals the fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch, that once defined a roughly circular enclosure of about 35 metres in diameter. Crops growing over a buried ditch tend to draw on the disturbed, moisture-retaining soil below and grow fractionally taller or greener than the surrounding field, tracing the shape of something that disappeared from the surface centuries ago.

The enclosure was identified from an aerial photograph taken in July 1989 as part of the Cork Aerial Survey and Aerial Photography programme. Its form is subcircular, meaning broadly round but not quite geometrically regular, with the south-east and south-west sides appearing flattened and the north-west arc retaining a more pronounced curve. A possible entrance may have existed on the south-east side. Complicating the picture slightly, two perpendicular linear cropmarks cut across the interior of the enclosure, most likely the corner of a later field boundary rather than anything earlier, and a separate pair of linear cropmarks in the adjacent field to the north-east may indicate the edges of a small rectangular field system. None of this later activity erases the earlier form; it simply layers over it, as tends to happen to any patch of ground that people have been using for a long time. A second circular enclosure sits roughly 240 metres to the south-west, suggesting this corner of North Cork once held a small cluster of enclosed settlements or farmsteads, their relationship to one another now largely a matter of inference.