No walls, no earthworks, no visible trace at ground level; just a cropmark, that tell-tale variation in the colour and height of growing crops that reveals, from the air, what centuries of ploughing and weathering have erased from the surface.

The enclosure came to light in aerial photographs taken in July 1989 as part of a systematic aerial survey of Cork's archaeology. What the images showed was the cropmark of a fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch, tracing a rectangular outline roughly 12 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west. Cropmarks form because buried features such as ditches, once filled with looser soil, retain moisture differently from the surrounding ground; the crops growing above them respond visibly, appearing greener and taller where a ditch lies beneath, or more parched where buried stonework is close to the surface. In the same field, further linear cropmarks suggest the presence of old field boundaries, hinting that the enclosure may have sat within a wider organised landscape, though the relationship between these features remains unclear. Rectangular enclosures of this kind are found across Ireland and are difficult to date without excavation; they may be prehistoric, early medieval, or later in origin.