It exists, for practical purposes, only as a faint pattern in a field crop, photographed from the air in July 1989. What the camera caught was a cropmark, the phenomenon by which buried features, a ditch or a bank compacted into the soil over centuries, cause the plants growing above them to ripen at a slightly different rate or colour, briefly betraying the outline beneath. That outline, roughly circular with a diameter of around thirty metres, belongs to a subcircular enclosure, its rounded corners and subtly linear sides suggesting it was once defined by a fosse, an external ditch, and an internal bank.

Enclosures of this general type are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape. Many are ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, though some examples are considerably older. Without excavation it is impossible to say with certainty what period the Doonawanly enclosure belongs to, or what activity once took place inside it. The aerial photograph that revealed it was taken as part of a systematic survey of County Cork, and the site was subsequently recorded in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, Volume 4, covering the north of the county, published in 2000. That a feature of this kind should survive at all, legible only for a few weeks each summer when the crop conditions are exactly right, is a reminder of how much of the Irish past is invisible at eye level.