No earthwork rises from the ground, no stones mark a perimeter. The only evidence of its existence came from the air, when aerial photographs taken in August 1996 revealed a cropmark tracing the shape of a roughly 30-metre-diameter ring. Cropmarks form when buried features, such as a fosse or filled ditch, affect the growth of crops above them; a fosse, being a dug ditch, retains more moisture and nutrients, causing the plants overhead to grow taller or ripen differently, leaving a pattern readable only from above.

What the photographs showed was not one enclosure but two. A larger enclosure adjoins the smaller one to the south-east, and the relationship between them is telling. The cropmark evidence suggests that the larger feature may actually overlie the smaller, meaning the two were not necessarily built or used at the same time. The smaller, 30-metre circle may have come first, with the larger enclosure constructed later, partly consuming or cutting across it. This kind of stratigraphic relationship, normally worked out through excavation, can sometimes be glimpsed from altitude when crop growth betrays the sequence of buried cuts. Without excavation, the date and function of either enclosure remain unknown, though circular enclosed sites in Ireland range from prehistoric ring-ditches to early medieval ringforts.