A circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter, defined by a buried ditch, has left no visible trace at ground level, yet its outline appears with quiet clarity as a cropmark, a phenomenon that occurs when crops growing over a filled-in ditch receive slightly different levels of moisture and nutrients, causing them to ripen or grow at a different rate from the surrounding plants and so reveal the shape of what lies beneath.

Enclosures of this type, typically a circular area bounded by a ditch and often an internal bank, are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape. They date most frequently to the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and are thought to have served as farmsteads, the enclosed space protecting a household, its animals, and its stores. Some are ringforts in the conventional sense, with earthworks still clearly visible above ground. Others, like this one at Lougharuane, have been ploughed flat over centuries of agricultural use, leaving only the ghost of a ditch pressed into the subsoil. The site came to wider attention relatively recently, identified through aerial imagery and made accessible to anyone with a curiosity and access to a satellite mapping application.