No earthwork rises above the ground, no stone breaks the surface; the site announces itself solely through the stress of a dry summer on growing crops. When aerial photographs were taken in July 1989, the parched field revealed a pattern invisible to anyone walking through it: two concentric arcs curving from south to north along the western edge of a field boundary, the inner arc measuring roughly 35 metres in circumference. It is the kind of discovery that depends entirely on the right angle, the right season, and the right year.

What the camera captured are cropmarks, a phenomenon in which buried features such as ditches or fosses alter how plants above them grow and colour. A fosse is simply a ditch, typically dug as a boundary or defensive element around a settlement or ceremonial space. Where two run closely together in concentric rings, the structure they once defined was almost certainly an enclosure of some significance, the kind associated across Ireland with ringforts, ceremonial sites, or high-status habitation from the early medieval period or earlier. The inner arc's dimensions suggest a modest but deliberate space, enclosed twice over, the doubled ditches implying either added security or social emphasis. The field fence that now bisects the western side of the site has no relationship to the ancient layout; it simply happens to run across it, indifferent to what lies beneath.