The site was not discovered by excavation or aerial survey in the traditional sense, but by scrutinising Google Earth Pro imagery captured in July 2018, when seasonal growth in the tillage crop threw the buried features into relief as cropmarks. These marks appear when buried ditches or banks affect the moisture and nutrients available to plants above them, causing them to grow differently from the surrounding crop and become visible from altitude.

What the cropmarks show is a roughly circular enclosure measuring around 62 metres in overall diameter, with an internal diameter of approximately 46 metres. Crucially, the site has not one but two fosses, or ditches, running concentrically, set between 7 and 9 metres apart. A double-fossed enclosure of this kind is relatively uncommon and suggests something more elaborate than a standard ringfort, the type of single-ditched farmstead enclosure that was built across Ireland in the early medieval period. The discovery was made by Simon Dowling and Jean-Charles Caillère. The landscape itself seems to have preserved a faint memory of the monument: a curving field boundary follows the western arc of the outer enclosure from the south-west round to the north-north-west, and a field boundary along the southern edge, which also serves as a watercourse, respects the same alignment. These boundaries may have been laid out centuries ago around a feature that was already largely invisible at ground level. Approximately 260 metres to the north-east lies a known ringfort, suggesting this part of Shankill was a focus of early activity.