Identified from aerial photography taken in 1973, it appeared as a circular cropmark, the faint signature left in growing vegetation when buried features beneath the soil, walls, ditches, or foundations, cause crops or grass above them to ripen or wither at slightly different rates. Cropmarks are among the more quietly remarkable tools in aerial archaeology; they reveal what is invisible at ground level, making the buried landscape briefly legible from the air.

The site was recorded as an enclosure in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1986, based entirely on that single aerial photograph. By 1995, when the Record of Monuments and Places was compiled, it had been dropped from the list entirely. Later aerial surveys found no trace of the cropmark, suggesting that whatever soil conditions or crop cover had made it visible in 1973 were not repeated. The circular form, had it been confirmed, would have been consistent with a ringfort type enclosure, the kind of enclosed farmstead that was common across Ireland during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. But without corroborating evidence, the Carrig site remained provisional, and eventually fell out of the official record altogether.

What that 1973 photograph captured may have been a genuine buried monument, or it may have been a trick of soil chemistry and seasonal light. The enclosure at Carrig occupies a strange category: a place that was formally recognised, then formally unrecognised, leaving no physical trace a visitor could stand beside or look at.