From the air in 1986, it showed one thing; on satellite imagery taken decades later, it showed something else entirely, and the two versions have never quite been reconciled.

The site sits at a townland boundary, abutting Ballinscoola (Cahercorney) to the north-west, with a barrow, a type of prehistoric burial mound, lying roughly 95 metres to the south-south-east. When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1840, nothing here was considered worth recording. By the 1897 edition of the OS 25-inch map, however, a subrectangular area of about 63 metres by 62 metres appeared, divided into three fields, with a farmstead occupying the south-east corner. That much is relatively legible history. The complications arrived in 1986, when the Bruff aerial photographic survey identified what looked like a large rectangular cropmark, with a distinct semicircular cropmark filling the south-western half of the enclosure. Cropmarks form when buried features, ditches, walls, or pits, affect how vegetation grows above them, revealing outlines invisible at ground level. The semicircular shape, if genuine, would hint at something older and more structural than a post-1700 field boundary. But when researchers examined modern orthoimages, taken between 2005 and 2017 by OSi, Digital Globe, and Google Earth, the semicircular cropmark had vanished. What remained was a rectangular, tree-lined area of roughly 80 metres by 76 metres, still divided into three main fields, consistent with a modest post-1700 farming enclosure associated with the abandoned farmstead in the south-east corner. Whether the 1986 aerial survey captured a fleeting condition of soil moisture, crop stress, or simply something ambiguous in the light, is unresolved. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in November 2020.

The site is on low-lying ground liable to seasonal flooding, so the margins of the heath can be waterlogged in wetter months; late summer or early autumn, when soil moisture differences are most likely to show in vegetation, would be the more practical time to visit. The tree-lined boundary of the enclosure is the clearest marker from ground level, and the remnant field divisions can be traced by walking the perimeter. The barrow to the south-south-east is a separate recorded monument and worth noting as you approach, a reminder that this corner of Limerick has been used, marked, and then quietly forgotten more than once.