No earthwork survives above the soil; the enclosure betrays itself only as a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried ditches affect the growth of crops or grass above them, leaving faint but readable traces that appear in aerial photography under the right conditions. The enclosure at Ryland measures roughly 120 metres north-north-east to south-south-west and about 65 metres across, making it a substantial feature, large enough to have housed a small monastic or early ecclesiastical community.

The full extent of this landscape only became apparent when a Google Earth image captured in July 2018 was examined closely. Simon Dowling was the first to report what the imagery showed: not only the fosse, or boundary ditch, of the ecclesiastical enclosure traceable along its western, north-eastern, and south-south-western arc, but also a second and potentially older feature pressed against it. At the south-east, the cropmarks of what may be a bivallate rath appear to join the enclosure's fosse. A rath is a ringfort, typically a circular or oval enclosed farmstead of early medieval date, and a bivallate example has two concentric ditches rather than one. Here, the two fosses of this possible rath trace a D-shaped area, their arcs visible to the north-east, east, and south-west, though they disappear once they cross inside the line of the ecclesiastical enclosure. The interior dimensions of this possible rath run to around 32 metres by 10 metres, with the outer extent reaching approximately 50 metres by 18 metres. The relationship between the two features, one religious, one possibly domestic or defensive, and the way the rath's ditches seem to dissolve within the larger enclosure, raises quiet questions about sequence and use that the cropmarks alone cannot fully answer.