It belongs to a category of site that only reveals itself through cropmarks, the subtle differences in how grass or grain grows above buried features, where filled-in ditches and compacted earth leave their signatures in the colour and height of the vegetation above them. The enclosure was not excavated or surveyed on foot; it was spotted in the sky.

The site was identified from an aerial photograph taken in 1969 as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, a systematic programme that documented large areas of the British Isles and Ireland during the latter half of the twentieth century and proved invaluable for locating low-visibility archaeology. The cropmark at Kilree appears as a roughly circular form, the typical shape of an early medieval enclosure or ringfort, a class of monument once used as a farmstead and defined by one or more surrounding banks and ditches. This particular example sits in pasture, which generally suppresses cropmark visibility compared to tillage, making the 1969 photograph a fortunate capture. A related enclosure lies approximately thirty metres to the north-west, suggesting this part of Kilree once held a cluster of such features.