Its defining feature is a fosse, a cut ditch that once marked out the perimeter of the site, now buried under centuries of ploughing. What gives it away is the differential growth of crops over the disturbed soil, producing a cropmark that shows up clearly on satellite imagery.

The site was identified and reported by Jean-Charles Caillère, one of a growing number of researchers using aerial and satellite platforms to locate features that ground-level survey would simply miss. Cropmark archaeology of this kind has transformed understanding of how densely settled the Irish countryside once was. What makes Higginstown particularly interesting is not the single enclosure in isolation but the cluster it belongs to. Two further enclosures are visible as cropmarks immediately to the south and south-east, their boundaries touching or overlapping in a conjoined arrangement that suggests sustained activity or a settlement that grew and shifted over time. A ring-ditch, the kind of circular feature typically associated with prehistoric funerary or ritual use, lies approximately 100 metres to the north-west, and a separate enclosure sits a similar distance to the east-north-east. A modern field boundary cuts east to west through the southern half of the main enclosure, bisecting it without ceremony.

Taken together, the pattern points to a landscape that was in use across multiple periods, with boundaries being dug, reused, and built upon in ways that only become apparent when you look straight down at the soil.