It exists, for now, only as a cropmark, the kind of faint agricultural anomaly that reveals itself not to the eye on the ground but to the eye looking down from above. Cropmarks form when buried features, walls, ditches, or filled pits, affect the growth of whatever is planted above them. Buried stonework stunts the crop; a buried ditch retains moisture and encourages it to grow taller and greener. From an aerial photograph, the outline of something that has not been visible for centuries can suddenly reappear, drawn in the subtle colour differences of a ripening field.

This particular cropmark was spotted in 2000 by Michael Connolly, then County Archaeologist with Kerry County Council, while he was conducting a systematic assessment of a forty square mile area north of Killarney. The work was not a dedicated archaeological survey in the conventional sense; it was part of the practical groundwork for choosing a road route, a reminder that infrastructure planning sometimes produces unexpected discoveries. Connolly identified the outline as a potential oval enclosure, a category of monument that in the Irish context can range from prehistoric settlement boundaries to early medieval farmsteads. Crucially, no trace of it appears on any Ordnance Survey Ireland historic mapping, which means it left no mark on the landscape that earlier surveyors could record. Whatever it was, it had been thoroughly forgotten long before the first detailed maps of Kerry were ever drawn.