What survives is visible only from the air, or more precisely, through the faint discolouration of crops growing over buried features, a phenomenon known as a crop-mark. Differential soil moisture and nutrient levels above buried ditches and banks cause plants to grow at slightly different rates, and in the right conditions and the right season, the underlying archaeology is legible from aerial photographs as if drawn in pencil on the landscape.

The enclosure recorded here is subrectangular in shape, measuring roughly 16 metres on its northwest to southeast axis and about 14 metres across. A modern field boundary cuts across its northeastern side, suggesting the enclosure was already forgotten long before anyone thought to preserve it. What makes Scartbarry particularly interesting is its setting among other enclosures of a different character. Two bivallate circular enclosures, meaning circular enclosures defined by two concentric banks or ditches rather than one, lie within close range: one approximately 40 metres to the southwest, another roughly 60 metres to the northeast. Both are also visible only as crop-marks. Bivallate enclosures of this kind are often associated with early medieval Ireland, where a double-ditched ringfort could indicate higher-status occupation or simply a more defensively minded approach to settlement. Whether the subrectangular enclosure at Scartbarry is contemporary with its circular neighbours or belongs to an entirely different period is not recorded, and the aerial evidence alone cannot settle the question.

There is nothing to see at ground level. The site exists, in any practical sense, as a photographic record rather than a physical presence, captured in a Cambridge University Committee for Aerial Photography image catalogued as BGP 49. The landscape around it continues as ordinary farmland, with no visible trace of the three enclosures that once organised life, or at least bounded it, in this corner of Cork.