It sits beneath tillage fields in rolling countryside, leaving absolutely no trace at ground level, and the only record of its existence comes from a single aerial photograph taken on 15 July 1970. What the camera caught that summer was a cropmark, the ghostly imprint of buried archaeology readable from above because crops grow fractionally differently over disturbed or compacted soil. In this case, the mark resolves into a roughly circular shape, approximately 35 metres at its widest point.

Cropmarks of this kind are typically associated with enclosed settlements or ceremonial sites from the prehistoric or early medieval periods in Ireland, where a surrounding ditch, long since silted and filled, continues to influence the soil chemistry and moisture retention above it. The circular form at Rathclevin fits comfortably within that tradition, though no excavation has confirmed a precise date or function. What the photograph also reveals is that a field boundary cuts across the monument from roughly east-northeast to west-southwest, passing south of centre, meaning the enclosure has been bisected at some point by later agricultural reorganisation. The monument is known from the aerial image catalogued as CUCAP BDL041, part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, a resource that identified a remarkable number of otherwise invisible Irish sites during survey flights in the mid-twentieth century.