The only evidence that something once stood here came from the air, and even then only under the right conditions. An aerial photograph captured a cropmark, the faint shadow of something buried, in which a roughly oval area of about 55 metres across showed up as a wide, diffuse band of darker plant growth.

Cropmarks appear when buried features alter the soil in ways that influence how crops or grass grow above them. A fosse, which is a ditch dug around an enclosure for defence or boundary-marking, retains more moisture than the surrounding ground, and that moisture shows up in the growth above it. The darker band recorded at Nohaval Daly almost certainly indicates exactly this, the outline of a ditch that once defined a circular or near-circular enclosure. Enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape. Many are the remains of ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that were built and occupied across Ireland from the early medieval period onward, though without excavation it is impossible to say more about what this particular site was or when it was in use. The oval shape and the scale are consistent with that tradition, but the ground itself has not confirmed it.