It only came to light in August 2022, when satellite imagery captured the tell-tale shadow of a cropmark, the phenomenon by which buried ditches and banks cause crops above them to grow at slightly different rates, producing outlines readable from the air that the eye on the ground would never detect.

The enclosure, identified and reported by Jean-Charles Caillère, is substantial: roughly 96 metres from north to south and 88 metres from east to west, placing it in the larger end of the curvilinear enclosure type found across Ireland. These enclosures are typically defined by a fosse, an encircling ditch, and in this case the fosse runs in a relatively straight line through the north-east and south-west sectors before resuming its curve around the rest of the circuit. What precisely the enclosure once contained or what period it belongs to is not yet established, but curvilinear enclosures of this scale are often associated with early medieval settlement. Adding further interest, a smaller companion enclosure sits approximately 15 metres to the south-west, also visible only as a cropmark, suggesting this corner of Kilkenny may preserve the faint outline of a more complex arrangement of activity than the bare agricultural field above it now implies.