It surfaces only as a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried features influence the growth of plants above them, causing subtle differences in colour and height that become legible from the air. The enclosure was identified not by excavation or survey on the ground, but through satellite imagery captured on 14 July 2018 via Google Earth Pro.

The researchers Jean-Charles Caillère, Simon Dowling, and James Eoghan made the identification by studying that aerial imagery closely. What they found was not just the circular outline of what may once have been a ringfort or similar enclosed settlement, but a second detail embedded within it. A field boundary that appears on both the first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 and its successor edition has since been levelled and erased from the visible landscape. Yet it too reappears as a cropmark, traceable running northeast to southwest across the southern portion of the enclosure. Two layers of erasure, one ancient and one relatively modern, preserved in the same field, readable only when the conditions of growth and light happen to align.