On an aerial photograph taken on 18 July 1970, a circular or curvilinear form emerged as a cropmark, the kind of faint discolouration in growing crops that can betray buried or long-vanished structures beneath the soil. Cropmarks appear when underground features, such as the filled-in ditches of an ancient enclosure, affect how plants above them grow and colour, making them visible from altitude in a way they simply are not from the ground. The shape was logged as a possible enclosure, the general term for a defined area bounded by a bank or ditch, used across Irish prehistory and the early medieval period for everything from farmsteads to ritual sites.

The complication here is that nature may have got there before archaeology. Alongside the cropmark signature, there is evidence of a small stream running from the south-western sector of the feature, and the possibility that what the photograph captured is simply a naturally wet or waterlogged patch of ground rather than any human-made boundary. A river runs roughly northwest to southeast about eighty metres to the south of the site, which would make localised dampness in the field plausible enough. The ambiguity has not been resolved. A second possible enclosure lies approximately 120 metres to the west, which lends a little more weight to the idea that there may be genuine archaeological interest in the area, though that site carries its own uncertainties. Two unconfirmed features in proximity can suggest a pattern, or they can simply reflect the way aerial photography picks up everything that breaks the visual monotony of a cultivated field, leaving the interpretation to later eyes.