The only reason we know it exists at all is a single aerial photograph taken in July 1987, which captured what is known as a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried features such as ditches or walls cause the vegetation above them to grow differently, revealing their shape from the air even when nothing survives above ground. What the photograph showed was the fosse, the encircling ditch, of a roughly circular enclosure measuring approximately thirty metres in diameter.

Circular enclosures of this general type are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape, often associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation it is not possible to say anything more specific about the Ballycushen example. What makes this one quietly interesting is precisely the manner of its survival. The enclosure itself is gone, dissolved back into the soil, yet the negative space of its ditch remained just legible enough in the subsoil chemistry to betray itself to a camera passing overhead. The site sits within a wider field system, suggesting that the surrounding landscape has been in agricultural use across a long stretch of time, the enclosure likely absorbed into farmland at some point and the ditch gradually filled in and forgotten.