Aerial photography confirmed what ground surveys could no longer find: a feature that had persisted in the landscape for centuries, possibly millennia, was gone. What remains now is essentially a record of an absence, a place defined more by what once existed than by anything a visitor could presently observe.

When it was still intact, the enclosure at Cullenstown measured roughly 37 metres across, its interior defined by an earthen bank, the kind of boundary feature associated with early medieval settlement and land management across Ireland. Such embanked enclosures, sometimes related to ringforts or to enclosed farmsteads of the early centuries AD, were typically formed by piling excavated soil into a continuous raised ring, occasionally with an outer ditch, known as a fosse, adding further definition. This example had no visible fosse, and no clear entrance could be identified. The bank itself was modest: around six metres wide at the north, with an internal height of between 0.6 and 1.2 metres and an external height of approximately 0.8 metres. Scrub vegetation had colonised the interior. The Tomgarrow stream runs roughly north to south about 80 metres to the west, the kind of proximity to water typical of early enclosed settlements, where reliable access to a watercourse was a practical necessity rather than an aesthetic preference.