Faint ridges and cropmarks, invisible at ground level and absent from the Ordnance Survey's historic cartographic record, have been slowly giving themselves away to cameras mounted in aircraft and satellites. The site at Ballynagally sits roughly 130 metres north of a watercourse that forms the boundary between that townland and the neighbouring townland of Scart, and what lies beneath the pasture there remains genuinely unresolved.

The site first came to attention during a 1986 aerial photographic survey centred on the Bruff area, recorded as Bruff 40.4 (AP 4/3666), which flagged it as a possible field system. Decades later, orthophotography taken by Ordnance Survey Ireland between 2005 and 2012, and separate Google Earth imagery, showed faint linear cropmarks running north to south across the ground. Cropmarks of this kind appear when buried features such as ditches or banks affect how vegetation grows above them, producing subtle differences in tone or density that only become legible from altitude. A further Google Earth image captured on 18 November 2018 revealed a separate set of cultivation ridges, the long, narrow mounds of soil thrown up by repeated ploughing, running east to west. Crucially, these ridges do not align with or sit within the north-south cropmarks, suggesting the two features may belong to entirely different periods or uses. Researchers now consider the north-south marks more likely to represent old drainage ditches than the boundaries of a pre-1700 field system, though the date of the cultivation ridges themselves has not been established.

This is not a site with a visitor path or an interpretive panel. The field is working pasture, and access would require the landowner's permission. For those with a particular interest in landscape archaeology, the most practical way to engage with Ballynagally is through the publicly available Google Earth imagery, where the November 2018 orthoimage gives the clearest view of the east-west ridges. The site is a useful reminder that the Irish countryside holds a great deal that was never written down or mapped, and that some of it only becomes legible when seen from far enough above.