No edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map ever marked it as an antiquity, and to anyone walking the land it would register as nothing more than a gently curving field boundary, following perhaps a third of what turns out to be a much larger arc. The enclosure was not formally recorded until relatively recently, and its existence was pieced together not from excavation or documentary evidence but from a cropmark, that quiet betrayal of buried archaeology that appears in dry summers when soil above subsurface features retains moisture differently from the surrounding ground, causing crops to grow in subtly distinct patterns visible only from the air.

The site came to the attention of the Archaeological Survey of Ireland when Simon Dowling passed on the information on 9 July 2013, having identified the cropmark from aerial imagery. An ASI aerial photograph, reference ASIAP 305/34, taken on 13 September 2002, captures this evidence and remains the primary visual record of the monument. Denis Power compiled the entry, which was uploaded to the national record on 19 August 2013. The enclosure itself has not been dated or classified beyond its general form, and without excavation its function remains open; circular enclosures of this kind in Ireland range from prehistoric ringforts, which served as enclosed farmsteads, to earlier ceremonial or funerary sites, and the surviving evidence here does not yet distinguish between these possibilities.

Because the monument survives almost entirely as a subsurface feature, a visit to Clogher East offers little in the way of obvious physical remains. The curving field boundary that preserves roughly a third of the circuit is the one visible trace, and recognising it as part of something larger requires a degree of prior knowledge. Aerial imagery, available through mapping platforms, gives a clearer sense of the full form than anything visible on the ground. The cropmark itself would be most legible from the air during a dry spell in late spring or early summer, when differential growth is at its most pronounced. For those interested in how archaeology is found and recorded rather than simply visited, this site is a useful illustration of just how much the Irish landscape conceals without any outward indication that something is there at all.