Cropmarks form when buried features affect how crops grow above them, parching faster over hard-packed ditches or growing more vigorously over disturbed, organic-rich soil, and in this case the camera caught what centuries of farming had quietly buried. A possible annexe could be made out to the south-east, and the site was not isolated: it sat within a wider complex of enclosures and pits spread across the surrounding landscape.

What lay beneath attracted formal investigation as part of the Discovery Programme's Ballyhoura Hills Project. Doody's 1995 excavation combined topographic and geophysical survey with targeted digging, opening three cuttings across the fosse. The ditch itself proved to be U-shaped, three metres wide at the surface and tapering to just half a metre at the base, with steeply cut sides dropping nearly two metres. The fill was not clean silt but layers of dumped refuse interspersed with natural silting, including burnt animal bones. At the south-west, a spread of redeposited boulder clay suggested the remains of an internal bank, and a deposit of large stones above the partially infilled ditch may represent a stone revetment, a facing wall built to stabilise the bank, that was later levelled. A furnace bottom turned up in this same deposit, and three post-holes or stake-holes cut into the bank were charcoal-rich enough to suggest the uprights had burned where they stood. Outside the fosse to the south-east, five post-holes hinted at a timber building, though the cutting was too narrow to reveal its plan. Radiocarbon dating from the enclosure proved inconclusive, leaving the chronology open. A smaller circular enclosure sits within the southern half of the interior and appears to post-date the main enclosure, while a rectangular enclosure immediately to the south-west appears to be earlier still, suggesting the site accumulated meaning and use across more than one phase of occupation.