No earthwork rises above the surface, no ditch catches the eye, and a modern fence cuts right through the middle of it. The only reason anyone knows it exists at all is a single aerial photograph taken on 14 July 1970, in which the buried outline of the circle declared itself as a cropmark, the faint but legible signature that buried archaeological features leave on growing crops when dry conditions cause the vegetation above them to ripen or wilt at a slightly different rate than the surrounding ground.

Cropmark enclosures of this kind are generally understood to be the traces of early medieval ringforts or their precursors, circular ditched settlements that were once among the most common features of the Irish countryside. The land here slopes gently upward toward the east from a small stream running north to south about 60 metres to the west, and the position offers fair views in all directions, which is exactly the kind of setting that would have suited a small defended farmstead. A second enclosure lies roughly 90 metres to the south-southwest, suggesting that whatever activity shaped this part of Kilkenny, it was not isolated to a single site.