What survives is a cropmark, a ghostly outline preserved not in stone or earthwork but in the differential growth of crops above buried soil. When conditions are right, the buried remains of an ancient bank cause the vegetation above to grow at a slightly different rate, and from the air the shape of something long-vanished briefly reappears.

The enclosure at Kilcanway was recorded in exactly this way, spotted in an aerial photograph taken in July 1975 as part of the Geological Survey of Ireland Air Photography collection. The image revealed a roughly irregular enclosure measuring approximately fifty metres along its north-south axis. Two of its sides, the east and the south, run in relatively straight lines, while the others curve; a possible entrance appears to have been located on the eastern side. This combination of straight and curved sides gives it an irregular character that sets it apart from the more uniformly circular ringforts that are common across the Irish landscape. Ringforts, usually dating from the early medieval period, were enclosed farmsteads defined by one or more earthen banks, but the irregular geometry here makes precise classification difficult without further investigation.

Beyond what the aerial photograph reveals, little else is certain about this site. No excavation record appears to exist, and the enclosure has not been traced on the ground in any documented way. It exists, for now, as a shape glimpsed from altitude in a summer photograph taken half a century ago.