There is nothing to see at Cloghleigh if you walk the land; no earthwork, no raised outline, no depression. The enclosure gives itself away only from the air.

The site was identified through colour aerial photography, where the buried outline appears as a cropmark, a phenomenon in which buried walls, ditches, or other subsurface features cause the crops growing above them to ripen or stress at slightly different rates, producing tonal contrasts visible from altitude. At Cloghleigh, the cropmark is rectangular in plan, with its long axis running broadly north-east to south-west. Rectangular enclosures of this kind in Ireland can belong to a wide range of periods and functions, from early medieval farmsteads to later field systems, and without excavation it is not possible to say more about what this particular example was built for or when. What the aerial record preserves is simply the geometry of something that was once substantial enough to alter the soil for metres around it, and which has since been entirely absorbed into the agricultural landscape.