The fields here are under tillage, the soil turned and replanted season after season, and yet beneath the surface the outlines of a substantial early settlement complex persist, detectable only from the air.

Cropmarks are the aerial archaeologist's primary tool for locating buried features in farmed landscapes. When soil conceals a filled-in ditch or the compacted remains of a bank, the crops growing above respond differently to drought or wet, producing variations in colour and height that show up clearly in aerial photographs. At Seskin, those photographs revealed a sub-circular enclosure, the shape typical of early medieval ringforts or their precursors, joined directly to a second enclosure to the east, and that one joined to a third beyond it. Associated with this chain of conjoined enclosures are two further adjoining enclosures, a smaller standalone enclosure, and what appears to be a field system, all visible as cropmarks across the same area. The cumulative picture is of a landscape that was once organised, bounded, and inhabited in some complexity, with multiple connected spaces suggesting not a single farmstead but something closer to a compound or small settlement grouping.

Because there is no trace of any of this at ground level, Seskin offers an unusual case of a place that is archaeologically significant precisely because it cannot be seen. The evidence exists only in the photographs and in whatever remains undisturbed beneath the plough layer, waiting.