Roughly oval in shape and measuring approximately 66 metres on its longer north-west to south-east axis and around 50 metres across, it belongs to a category of site that only becomes legible when crops growing over buried features respond differently to what lies beneath, producing variations in colour and height that show up in aerial photography as cropmarks.

Cropmarks form when buried walls, ditches, or banks affect the moisture and nutrients available to plants above them. Soil over a filled-in ditch tends to retain more water and produce lusher, taller growth, while soil over a buried wall dries out faster and stunts the crop. The result, from altitude, is a ghost of the original structure drawn in the standing grain. The enclosure at Farrantemple was spotted and reported by Jean-Charles Caillère using satellite imagery captured on 13 April 2020, a date that happened to catch the crop at precisely the right stage of growth for the underlying archaeology to show through. Enclosures of this general form in Ireland are associated with a wide range of periods and functions, from early medieval farmsteads to prehistoric settlements, though without excavation the age and purpose of this particular example remain unknown.