That is, in a sense, precisely what makes it interesting. Beneath what appears to be ordinary pasture in the flat, undulating lowlands of County Kilkenny lies a rectangular enclosure roughly 30 metres across its long axis, invisible at ground level and detectable only by the instruments that found it.

The enclosure came to light not through excavation or aerial photography but through geophysical survey, carried out in 2017 ahead of a proposed solar farm development. Geophysics in this context means ground-penetrating techniques that detect buried features by measuring subtle changes in the soil's magnetic or electrical properties, producing ghostly plans of structures that vanished from the surface long ago. The Ballyconra enclosure is approximately 30 metres northeast to southwest and between 20 and 25 metres northwest to southeast. It sits immediately beside a second, similarly sized rectangular enclosure to the west, and roughly 135 metres to the south, geophysics revealed what appears to be a settlement row extending eastward. Within the enclosure itself, a smaller rectangular structure aligned roughly north to south may represent a house. The survey also identified more than a dozen other enclosures in the surrounding area, suggesting that this quiet stretch of Kilkenny lowland was once considerably more occupied than its present pastoral calm would suggest.