No earthwork survives, no raised bank or hollow to catch the eye. What remains is a cropmark, a ghost written in differential growth, visible only from the air and only under the right conditions of drought and summer light.

In July 1996, aerial photography captured a curvilinear enclosure roughly forty metres in diameter, its outline traced by a fosse, the term for a ditch cut into the ground as a boundary or defensive feature. Cropmarks of this kind appear when buried ditches, which retain more moisture than the surrounding subsoil, cause crops above them to grow taller or stay greener longer, producing a faint but readable outline when viewed from altitude. The Cooleeshal More enclosure is not alone: a second enclosure adjoins it to the south-east, the two forming a conjoined arrangement that suggests, though cannot confirm, a sequence of use or perhaps related functions within the same settled area. Circular or curvilinear enclosures of this type are broadly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, where a rath or ringfort, an enclosed farmstead defined by earthen banks and ditches, was the dominant form of rural habitation for several centuries. Whether this site fits that pattern, or belongs to an earlier or later tradition, the cropmark evidence alone cannot say.