What exists here exists only as a ghost in the grass, a circular shadow pressed into the soil and legible solely from the air. On a summer's day in July 1969, an aerial photograph taken as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography (reference CUCAP AYK065) caught the cropmark of a roughly circular enclosure about thirty metres in diameter. Cropmarks form when buried features, such as the ditches and banks of ancient enclosures, affect how plants grow above them; crops or grass over a filled-in ditch tend to grow taller and greener, while those over compacted surfaces stay shorter, and from altitude these differences resolve into shapes that would otherwise be entirely invisible.

What the 1969 photograph revealed was not one enclosure but the overlapping traces of at least two, and possibly three, distinct structures. The more clearly defined circle appears to share its fosse, the outer ditch that typically defined such enclosures, with an older and slightly larger predecessor, which extended ten to fifteen metres beyond it to the north and north-east. A fosse is simply the ditch element of a banks-and-ditch boundary system, common to Irish ringforts and other enclosed settlements from the early medieval period. A third partial curving fosse belonging to a separate enclosure was also visible immediately to the south on the same photograph. The site sits on the edge of a large quarry to the north-north-east, with modern field boundaries running along both its western and southern edges, meaning the surviving archaeology is squeezed between industrial extraction and the ordinary geometry of agricultural land division.