The site exists, for most practical purposes, as a cropmark, the kind of faint discolouration in a growing cereal crop that betrays a buried fosse, or ditch, beneath. Soil above a filled ditch retains more moisture than the surrounding ground, so crops rooted there grow fractionally taller and greener, or ripen at a slightly different rate, and from above that difference reads as a ghostly outline of something long since levelled.

The enclosure was identified and reported by Jean-Charles Caillère, who spotted it on satellite imagery. What the fosse originally enclosed is not recorded. Circular enclosures of this general type are associated in Ireland with a broad range of functions and periods, from early medieval settlement and stock management to ceremonial or funerary use in prehistory, and without excavation it is rarely possible to say which applies. What makes the Donaghmore example particularly interesting is its company. A concentric enclosure sits approximately 190 metres to the north-east, and a ringfort, the kind of circular earthen enclosure most commonly associated with early medieval farmsteads, lies around 250 metres to the west. Three monuments of related form clustered within a few hundred metres of one another suggest that this quiet stretch of Kilkenny farmland was, at some point, a good deal busier than it looks today.