Aerial imagery captured in July 2018 revealed a series of rectilinear cropmarks near Ardoyne, the kind of subtle discolouration in grass or crops that forms when buried structures alter how soil retains moisture. The shapes hint at enclosures, rectangular outlines pressed into the earth, that might otherwise go entirely unnoticed at ground level.

The cropmarks sit in the vicinity of two already-recorded medieval features: a church at Ardoyne and a motte and bailey castle nearby. A motte and bailey was a form of early Norman fortification consisting of a raised earthen mound, the motte, topped with a tower or keep, alongside a lower enclosed courtyard, the bailey. Together, a church and a castle of this type would typically anchor a small rural settlement, and the rectilinear enclosures could plausibly represent the footprint of just such a deserted medieval village, the kind of community that quietly vanished from the Irish landscape during periods of plague, land consolidation, or political upheaval. The word "deserted" in this context is almost always more melancholy than dramatic; these places did not disappear overnight but were gradually abandoned, their buildings collapsing and their field patterns slowly swallowed by later agriculture. That said, the interpretation remains uncertain. The same cropmarks could equally be the traces of drainage channels dug after 1700, a mundane agricultural intervention that would leave very similar marks in the soil.