The site is invisible at ground level, revealing itself only from the air as a cropmark, the faint differential growth of grass or grain over buried ditches and banks that betrays what lies beneath. What the aerial photographs show is a bivallate enclosure, meaning one defined by two concentric rings of ditching rather than one, with an internal diameter of around 28 metres and an outer diameter of roughly 40 metres. That double-ditched circuit is a detail worth pausing on: bivallate ringforts in Ireland are generally considered to indicate a site of some social status, the extra labour of digging a second ditch suggesting the enclosure belonged to someone of standing in the early medieval period.

The cropmark was captured in aerial photography held under the reference CUCAP BGP 49. What makes the Scartbarry site particularly interesting is a detail that has nothing to do with archaeology in the conventional sense: the townland boundary in this area actually bends to respect the enclosure. Townland boundaries in Ireland are famously ancient and conservative, often preserving the memory of features that have long since vanished from sight. The fact that this boundary defers to the enclosure suggests the earthwork was still a recognised landmark, perhaps even a legally meaningful one, when the boundary was fixed. The site does not stand alone either. A small sub-rectangular enclosure lies approximately 40 metres to the north-east, and a second bivallate circular enclosure sits around 120 metres further in the same direction, both also visible only as cropmarks. The clustering of enclosures like this is a common pattern across Cork and the wider Irish midlands, hinting at settlements or territorial groupings rather than isolated farmsteads.