That slight undulation is all that physically remains of an enclosure that once measured roughly 55 metres by 45 metres. The real revelation came not from the ground but from above, when aerial photography exposed what centuries of ploughing had tried to erase.

The site was recorded on the 1937 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a hachured oval enclosure, the standard cartographic shorthand of the time for a raised or banked feature. By then, or sometime thereafter, the bank had been levelled entirely. It was cropmark evidence that transformed the picture. Cropmarks form when buried features such as ditches or banks affect how crops grow above them, typically showing as darker or lighter stripes and shapes at certain times of year when seen from the air. What the aerial photograph revealed was not the oval shape the old map had suggested, but the outline of a fosse, a defining ditch, belonging to a pentagonal enclosure. Five-sided enclosures of this kind are relatively uncommon in the Irish archaeological record, which tends to favour circular or oval forms, and their origins and purposes are not always straightforward to interpret. The discrepancy between the oval shown on the 1937 map and the pentagonal shape visible as a cropmark likely reflects the limitations of ground-level survey versus what becomes legible only from altitude.