The pair only came to wider attention through lidar imagery, the remote-sensing technology that strips away vegetation and topsoil in a digital scan to reveal the ghostly geometry of features long since levelled or overgrown. Together they span roughly 75 metres from east to west, a substantial footprint for what may once have been a defended settlement, an agricultural enclosure, or something whose precise function remains unresolved.

Circular enclosures of this kind are scattered across the Irish landscape in considerable numbers, and they vary enormously in date, purpose, and status. Some are the remains of ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that were the dominant settlement form in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from around the sixth to the twelfth centuries. Others are older still, prehistoric in origin, or later and more ambiguous. The conjoined arrangement at Cloghleafin is the more unusual feature here. Two such enclosures sharing a boundary, rather than standing independently, suggests either a deliberate pairing in the original design or a later addition to an existing site. The detail was brought to light by Colm Chambers, whose observation added the site to the record of known monuments in the area.