It is there nonetheless, preserved not in stone or earthwork but in the soil's own memory, visible only from the air as a cropmark, the kind of subtle discolouration in growing grain that betrays buried ditches beneath a ploughed surface.

The enclosure at Ballyvaheen came to light in July 1970, when an aerial photograph taken as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography captured a clear circular impression roughly 42 metres across on a gently south-facing slope. What that image revealed was a double-ditched enclosure, a smaller inner fosse and a wider outer one encircling it, with what appears to be a causeway crossing both ditches in the eastern quadrant. A fosse, in this context, is simply a defensive or boundary ditch, and the double arrangement, with a possible formal entrance way, suggests something rather more considered than a simple farmyard enclosure. The field boundaries to the north and east have since been levelled, removing whatever additional landscape context might once have helped date or interpret the site.

Because the structure survives only as a cropmark, there is nothing to see at ground level today. The site lies under tillage, an ordinary agricultural field on undulating Tipperary farmland, with no surface trace of the two concentric ditches that a passing aircraft once briefly made legible.