There is no ridge, no earthwork, no depression to suggest anything is there at all, and yet the outline survives, legible only when seen from the air.

The enclosure was identified through aerial photography as part of the Cork Archaeological Survey Aerial Photograph programme, which systematically scanned the Irish landscape for crop marks and soil marks, the faint variations in colour and growth that betray buried features below the surface. Ploughing and tillage over many generations have flattened whatever upstanding element the enclosure once had, but the ditch that originally defined it remains detectable underground, its filled soil retaining enough difference in moisture or composition to show up in the right conditions. What makes this particular site slightly more complex is that its ditch appears to abut or conjoin with that of a second, smaller circular enclosure lying to the northeast. Circular enclosures of this type are often the remains of early medieval ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that once dotted the Irish countryside in their thousands, though without excavation it is impossible to say with any certainty what this one was or when it was built. The relationship between the two adjoining ditches is itself an interesting puzzle, suggesting either that one enclosure was added to an existing one, or that they were always intended to function as a pair.