This one in Ballyadeen, north County Cork, is visible only from the air, and even then only faintly. A 1989 aerial photograph revealed what is known as a shadow site, a subtle darkening or crop variation in a field that hints at buried or levelled structures beneath the surface. In this case, the outline is of a circular enclosure, the kind of roughly circular earthwork, typically defined by a bank and ditch, that once served as a farmstead or settlement across early medieval Ireland. What makes this example particularly elusive is that on the ground there is almost nothing to detect: a slight, poorly defined rise measuring roughly sixteen metres north to south and twenty metres east to west, with no surviving fosse, the encircling ditch that would once have been the enclosure's most visible defensive or boundary feature.

The photograph that identified it was taken in July 1989 as part of a systematic aerial survey, and the site sits in the north-western corner of a tillage field on a gentle south-facing slope. Cropmarks of this kind tend to appear most clearly in dry summers, when differential moisture retention above buried features causes variation in how crops ripen overhead. The site is not entirely isolated in the landscape: a second circular enclosure lies approximately eighty metres to the south, in the neighbouring townland of Kilcummer Upper, suggesting this part of north Cork preserves traces of a broader pattern of early settlement that has otherwise been almost entirely smoothed away by centuries of farming.