The site is invisible to anyone walking across it; what revealed it was the differential growth of crops over buried ditches, a phenomenon known as a cropmark, where buried features cause the vegetation above them to grow taller or shorter than the surrounding field, creating patterns readable only from the air. When 2015 aerial imagery from Google Earth Pro was examined, a substantial enclosure emerged around a known ringfort, and the scale of what had been hiding in plain sight became clear.

Ringforts are enclosed farmsteads, typically circular, built across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards, usually defined by a single bank and ditch. What makes this site at Grenagh unusual is the presence of a much larger enclosure wrapped around the ringfort itself, suggesting a more complex settlement or landholding than the inner enclosure alone would imply. The outer ditches came to light during monitoring work on adjacent development sites in 2017 and 2020, when three separate ditch sections were exposed and partially excavated. Each ditch was cut in a V-shaped profile, measuring between 2.32 and 2.5 metres wide and between 1.18 and 1.51 metres deep; dimensions that indicate a deliberate and substantial boundary rather than a casual field division. The finds recovered from the fills push the story forward in time. Sherds of medieval pottery dated to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were found alongside hone stones, used for sharpening blades, and slag, a by-product of metalworking. Together these suggest that the enclosure was not simply a remnant of early medieval farming but remained in active use, or was at least still accumulating deposits, well into the later medieval period.