It appears on no historic Ordnance Survey Ireland maps, meaning that successive generations of cartographers passed it by entirely. What survives today is not a wall or an earthwork you could trip over, but a cropmark, the faint ghostly outline that buried features leave in growing vegetation when dry conditions cause the soil above them to behave differently from the ground around them. It is, in the most literal sense, a place that only becomes legible from the air.

The enclosure was first identified during the Bruff aerial photographic survey in 1986, recorded under reference Bruff 83, AP 4/3625. Aerial surveys of this kind transformed Irish archaeology from the 1970s onwards, revealing hundreds of sites that ground-level inspection had never detected. The circular cropmark at Newtown measures approximately forty metres in diameter, and its form is consistent with a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that was the basic unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches enclosing a family's dwelling and outbuildings. A confirmed ringfort already exists about three hundred metres to the northwest, suggesting this part of Cloonagh Barony was reasonably well settled at some point in the early medieval period. More recent satellite imagery, including an orthophoto taken between 2005 and 2012 and a Google Earth image dated 18 November 2018, confirms the cropmark is still visible, though it is now bisected by a farm track running northeast to southwest, and its northern arc is interrupted by a field boundary that post-dates 1700. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded in April 2021.

There is nothing to see at ground level in the conventional sense. The site sits in improved agricultural pasture, about 160 metres northeast of the townland boundary with Rahard, and the land is in active farm use. The cropmark itself is only legible from above, so the most practical way to appreciate the site is through the aerial and satellite imagery referenced in the archaeological record. For anyone curious about how such features are detected and mapped across the Irish landscape, the Bruff survey imagery and the publicly available Google Earth orthoimage provide a reasonable illustration of just how much of the country's early medieval past remains encoded in soil chemistry rather than standing stone.