It gave itself away not through excavation or fieldwork, but through the behaviour of crops growing above it on a warm June day in 2018, when satellite imagery caught the faint discolouration of a cropmark, the tell-tale pattern that appears when buried ditches or foundations cause the vegetation above them to grow at a slightly different rate or colour to the surrounding ground.

The enclosure, identified and reported by Simon Dowling from Google Earth imagery dated 28 June 2018, is sub-rectangular in shape, measuring approximately 40 metres across on its northeast-southwest axis. What makes it particularly interesting is the suggestion of a double-ditched arrangement: a fosse, or defensive ditch, forming the inner boundary, and a less pronounced outer fosse running roughly 8 metres beyond it. Double-ditched enclosures of this kind are associated in Ireland with a range of periods and uses, from early medieval ringforts to earlier ceremonial or agricultural enclosures, though without excavation it is impossible to say what this one represents. The southeastern and southern sectors of the enclosure do not appear in the cropmark, either because the buried features are shallower or more disturbed in that area, or simply because the soil conditions differed on the day the image was captured. A field boundary that once appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, but has since been removed from the landscape, also shows up as a cropmark running northwest to southeast across the southwestern edge of the site, a reminder that the fields we see today are themselves layered over older arrangements of land.