No earthworks rise above the surrounding fields, no stones break the surface. What reveals the site is light, specifically the way that buried ditches and banks interfere with crop growth, causing faint but legible differences in colour and height when viewed from the air. It was an aerial photograph that brought this particular enclosure into the record, and the site exists, to all practical purposes, only as an image captured from above.

What the photograph shows is a bivallate circular enclosure, meaning a roughly circular space defined by two concentric ditches or banks rather than one, with an internal diameter of approximately 26 metres and an outer diameter of around 40 metres. Enclosures of this type are generally associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, the enclosed space likely serving as a farmstead or homestead, the double circuit of earthworks providing an added degree of boundary or protection. What makes Scartbarry quietly interesting is that it does not stand alone. Two further features are visible as crop-marks within roughly 120 metres to the south-west: a small sub-rectangular enclosure and a second bivallate circular enclosure. Three separate sites close together suggests this was not an isolated farmstead but part of a small cluster of activity, perhaps several households, perhaps successive phases of occupation, perhaps related agricultural or settlement functions spread across a modest area of ground that has since been entirely absorbed into the farmed landscape.