No earthwork rises above the ground, no stones mark a boundary; what survives is a cropmark, the faint but legible trace left when buried ditches cause the vegetation above them to grow differently to the surrounding soil. In dry summer conditions, the differential moisture held in a filled-in fosse, the defensive or boundary ditch of a former enclosure, produces a slightly lusher or slightly more stressed strip of crop, and from altitude that strip becomes readable as a shape.

The photograph in question was taken in July 1989 as part of an aerial survey programme, and it captured enough to sketch the rough outline of whatever once stood here. The western side of the enclosure appears as a straight run of approximately twenty metres; this then joins a curving northern arc measuring around ninety metres in circumference, suggesting a roughly circular or sub-oval form overall. Enclosures of this kind in Ireland range in date and function from early medieval ringforts used as farmsteads to prehistoric ritual sites, and without excavation there is no way to say which category, if either, applies at Cornahinch. What the aerial image also shows is that the feature sits within a wider field system, meaning it was not an isolated structure but part of a landscape that was, at some point, deliberately organised and worked.