The enclosure does not appear on Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, which makes its existence all the more intriguing. It was not discovered through excavation or documentary research, but through the particular angle of a camera pointing downward from an aircraft, catching in a single oblique photograph what centuries of ground-level observation had apparently missed.

The site was first identified in 2002 from an oblique aerial photograph held by the Aerial Survey of Ireland's Aerial Photograph archive, known as ASIAP. Aerial photography of this kind works by revealing cropmarks, soil discolourations, or subtle differences in vegetation growth that betray buried or partially obscured features beneath the surface, patterns that are simply invisible to anyone standing at field level. Later satellite imagery, including a Digital Globe orthoimage captured between 2011 and 2013 and additional Google Earth imagery, confirmed the outline: an oval-shaped area measuring approximately 76 metres on a northwest to southeast axis and around 50 metres northeast to southwest. That footprint puts it comfortably in the range of a ringfort or similar enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval earthwork that was used across early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or defended settlement. The site was compiled in the national record by Fiona Rooney and uploaded in November 2021.

Because the monument has not been excavated or formally surveyed on the ground, there is little to guide a visitor in any conventional sense. The land is reclaimed pasture, which means the original earthworks, if any survive beneath the surface, are likely subtle at best. The most instructive way to appreciate the site is probably the same way it was discovered: through aerial imagery. Pulling up Google Earth and examining the field boundaries around Farrihy reveals how the modern landscape has quietly absorbed and preserved the shape of something much older, its dimensions still legible in the way hedgerows and field edges have arranged themselves around an oval that nobody officially mapped.