No earthwork rises above the grass, no stone marks the perimeter, and nothing interrupts the roll of the undulating ground sloping away to the south-east. The only evidence that something once stood here is a photograph taken from the air in July 1970, in which the ghost of a sub-rectangular enclosure appears as a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried walls or ditches affect the growth of whatever is planted above them, producing faint but legible outlines visible only under the right conditions of drought, angle, and altitude.

The photograph, taken as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography and catalogued as CUCAP BDR 76, reveals a roughly rectangular form with what appears to be an entrance cut into its eastern side. Enclosures of this kind are common across the Irish landscape, sometimes associated with early medieval settlement, sometimes with prehistoric activity, though the Monksgrange example has not been dated with any precision. By the time the image was analysed, the field had already been recently ploughed, further disturbing whatever physical trace might have remained below the surface. The plough is, in a quiet way, the great antagonist of such sites, each pass through the soil compressing and dispersing the buried features that aerial photography briefly made legible.