It came to light not through excavation but through a satellite image captured on a single summer's day in June 2018, when the parched crop above it revealed the outline of something buried long ago. This is cropmark archaeology, a process in which buried features such as ditches retain moisture differently from the surrounding soil, causing the plants above them to grow at slightly different rates. From altitude, those variations in colour and height resolve into shapes that speak to what lies beneath.

The enclosure was identified and reported by Simon Dowling and Jean-Charles Caillère, who spotted it in Google Earth imagery. What makes the site particularly suggestive is the cluster of features surrounding it. A small ring-ditch sits on the very perimeter of the enclosure itself, and at least four further ring-ditches have been identified in the immediate vicinity. Ring-ditches are the ploughed-down remains of prehistoric burial mounds known as barrows, circular earthworks that once stood above ground as markers of the dead. The grouping of several such features together is consistent with a barrow cemetery or barrow complex, a type of funerary landscape found across Ireland in which the dead were interred in proximity to one another, sometimes over many generations. Whether the central enclosure was itself a monument of this kind, or served some other purpose within the complex, remains an open question.