It took a single aerial photograph, taken in 1973 as part of a Geological Survey of Ireland flight, to reveal what ground-level inspection had apparently missed: several distinct enclosures of different shapes, sitting quietly in the fields and leaving almost no impression on the surface.

The photograph showed a circular enclosure and a rectangular one to the south-west of a feature already known locally as Ballyvesta Fort, along with a roughly rectangular enclosure to the south-east, itself adjoined by a further circular enclosure. Enclosures of this type, typically formed by a bank and sometimes a ditch, are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape, often interpreted as the remains of ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that were the standard unit of rural settlement from the early medieval period onwards. The circular enclosure immediately south-west of Ballyvesta Fort measures twenty-six metres in diameter in both its north-south and east-west axes, making it a relatively modest example. Its boundary is a very low earthen bank, so slight that a post-and-wire fence running north to south cuts straight across it on the eastern side, the working infrastructure of a modern farm passing through what may be the outline of a settlement many centuries old.