It exists, for all practical purposes, only from the air. Roughly twenty metres across and defined by a fosse, a term for a ditch or trench dug to delineate or defend a space, the circle shows up as a cropmark on aerial photography, the kind of faint tonal variation that appears in grass or grain when buried features alter the soil's drainage and nutrient content. The ground above it looks like any other field.

Cropmark archaeology of this kind became a serious tool for Irish field research across the twentieth century, revealing the outlines of enclosures, ring ditches, and field systems that had long since been ploughed flat or simply absorbed into the landscape. The Kilpipe example sits on a gentle north to north-easterly facing slope that looks out over the steep side of a river valley, a position that, in the broader Irish archaeological pattern, is fairly typical of enclosed settlements from the early medieval period onward, though the notes stop short of assigning a firm date or function. Circular enclosures of this scale could have served as ringforts, ecclesiastical enclosures, or stock enclosures, but without excavation the ground keeps its own counsel.