The enclosure is not visible on the ground in any obvious way, but aerial imagery taken between 2001 and 2013 reveals its outline clearly: a circular ditch, now buried or levelled, that once defined a deliberate boundary in the landscape.

Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological features found across Ireland, ranging from ringforts used as defended farmsteads in the early medieval period through to earlier ceremonial or funerary enclosures. What they share is the ditch, often accompanied by an internal or external bank, that marked a threshold between the world inside and the world outside. At Gortlassabrien, the surrounding land has been reclaimed for agriculture at some point, a process that frequently involves levelling banks and filling or ploughing across ditches, erasing surface traces while leaving the soil disturbance legible from above. It is precisely because the filled ditch retains different moisture and vegetation than the ground around it that the circle re-emerges in aerial photographs, particularly in dry summers when crop or grass growth marks out what lies beneath.