It never made it onto the Ordnance Survey's historic maps, which means it passed unrecorded through the great era of Irish cartographic documentation, quietly buried beneath improved pasture on the floodplain between the Dead River and the Mulkear River.

The monument came to light not through excavation or local tradition, but through a cropmark, the faint discolouration that buried features sometimes produce in growing vegetation when seen from altitude. Cropmarks appear because underground stonework or ditches affect how soil retains moisture, which in turn affects how plants above them grow and colour in dry periods. The Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986 caught it first, logging it as reference Bruff 135 (AP 4/3723). A later photograph taken by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland on 23 August 2000 confirmed the circular earthwork shape, and Digital Globe orthophotos from 2011 to 2013 showed it again. By June 2018, Google Earth imagery had lost it entirely, illustrating how dependent such discoveries are on season, crop type, and the precise angle of light. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in July 2020.

There is little to see at ground level. The site sits in level agricultural land, and without a drought-stressed crop overhead and a camera far above it, the enclosure simply disappears into the grass. The floodplain setting, close to two rivers, is typical of early Irish enclosed sites, which were often positioned near water sources, but without excavation the date and function of this particular feature remain unknown. For anyone drawn to the archaeology of the invisible, the interest lies less in visiting the field itself than in comparing the 1986 survey image against the 2000 aerial photograph and watching the same circular form emerge twice, decades apart, before vanishing again into ordinary farmland.