It does not announce itself with earthworks or standing stones. Instead, it announces itself from the air, and only under the right conditions: a dry summer, when parched grass above a buried fosse, the ditch that once defined the boundary of the enclosure, reveals its outline as a faint but readable ring in the crop.

The enclosure was identified as a cropmark in aerial photography taken in July 1989, part of a systematic survey of Irish field monuments. What the photograph captured was the ghost of a circular ditch roughly 40 metres in diameter, with an entrance to the south-west. Enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland, many of them the remains of raths or ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that were the dominant settlement form of early medieval Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Others may be prehistoric. Without excavation it is rarely possible to say which category any particular example belongs to, and this one is no exception. What the cropmark confirms is that a boundary was deliberately cut into the earth here at some point, enclosing a space large enough to have served as a working farmstead, and that an entrance was positioned to face the south-west.