This enclosure at Caherelly East exists in the archaeological record almost entirely as a ghost: a rectangular outline pressed into cropmarks, visible to aircraft and satellites under the right conditions, but otherwise leaving no trace that a casual visitor, or indeed a cartographer, would ever notice.

The site came to light during the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, when analysts identified a roughly rectangular cropmark on low-lying rough, wet pasture cut through by land drains and watercourses. Cropmarks form when buried features, walls, ditches, or pits alter the way soil retains moisture, causing the vegetation above them to grow differently from the surrounding ground; from altitude, these subtle differences in crop colour or density resolve into shapes that can suggest the outline of a long-buried structure. The Caherelly East enclosure measures approximately 22 metres on its northeast-southwest axis and 17 metres on its northwest-southeast axis, making it a modest but clearly defined rectangular form. Satellite imagery from Digital Globe, taken between 2011 and 2013, confirmed the outline again. A Google Earth image captured on 25 May 2017, however, showed nothing at all, a reminder of how dependent this kind of archaeology is on season, rainfall, and the particular crops growing in any given year. Two other monuments lie nearby: a second enclosure sits around 30 metres to the southwest, and a standing stone lies roughly 60 metres to the southeast, suggesting this low-lying ground was once rather busier than its present appearance implies. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded to the national monuments database in September 2020.

The site sits on rough, wet pasture and is not signposted or formally accessible as a heritage site. There is nothing to see at ground level in the conventional sense; the enclosure has no upstanding remains, and without the benefit of aerial imagery taken under favourable conditions, the field looks like any other in this part of Limerick. Those with a serious interest in the surrounding landscape might find the nearby standing stone the more rewarding point of focus, as it is at least a physical presence. The real interest here is in what the aerial record quietly suggests: that this unassuming patch of drained farmland was once enclosed and deliberately bounded, its purpose now unknown, its shape only occasionally legible from above.