Nothing is visible on the ground, yet aerial photographs taken in July 1989 revealed the cropmark of a rectangular enclosure, roughly 30 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south. Cropmarks appear when buried features, such as the filled-in ditch or fosse that would once have defined an enclosure's boundary, cause differential growth in crops or grass above them, creating pale or dark bands readable only from the air under the right conditions of drought and low-angle light.

The photographs showed more than just the enclosure's outer ditch. Several dark maculae, patches of discolouration that may indicate the positions of pits, were visible in the interior, concentrated mainly on the eastern side. Similar markings appeared in the surrounding fields to the west and east, suggesting activity that extended beyond the enclosed area itself. Linear cropmarks running through fields to the north and south are thought to represent levelled field fences, the buried remnants of a former agricultural landscape. The site does not stand in isolation: a linear earthwork lies approximately 80 metres to the west, and a separate enclosure sits around 80 metres to the south-east, hinting that this part of north Cork was once a fairly organised and active patch of countryside, even if almost every physical trace of that organisation has since been ploughed away or otherwise erased.