The land above it looks like ordinary pasture, the kind that stretches unremarkably across this part of the county, and the person who farms it has never noticed anything unusual about the ground underfoot.

The site owes its entire existence in the historical record to a single aerial photograph taken by the Ordnance Survey in 1840. In that image, a semi-circular cropmark is just visible, suggesting the eastern arc of what may once have been a roughly circular enclosure. Cropmarks appear when buried features, such as ditches or banks, cause the vegetation above them to grow differently, either more vigorously over filled-in soil or more sparsely over stone, and they can be legible from the air while leaving no surface trace at all. The enclosure at Beakstown is exactly that kind of site. It did not appear on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map from 1843, nor on the revised edition surveyed in 1952 to 1953, which suggests that by those dates, if any earthwork had ever been visible, it had long since levelled out. The photograph predates both maps, and offers a glimpse of something the surveyors on the ground either missed or could not find.