It has never been excavated, never been mapped on the ground in any meaningful way, and exists in the archaeological record almost entirely because of a single aerial photograph taken on 9 July 1969. What the camera captured was a cropmark, the kind of faint discolouration in growing vegetation that reveals buried features below the surface. Soil that has been disturbed by ancient digging, whether for a ditch, a foundation, or a boundary, retains moisture differently from the undisturbed ground around it, and in dry summers that difference shows up in the crop above. It is a ghostly way for the past to announce itself.

Cropmark enclosures of this rough size and shape are generally associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, though without excavation the date and function of this one remain open questions. The aerial photograph, taken as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, also shows a second enclosure immediately to the north, suggesting that whatever activity once took place here was not isolated. Field boundaries visible on the same photograph cut across and alongside the monument, indicating that later agricultural use paid little attention to what lay beneath. The situation has since become considerably more precarious. Satellite imagery examined in 2021 showed a quarry access road apparently running directly over the enclosure, and the quarry itself extends from the north-east, pressing against the site from multiple directions. The enclosure that survived as a shadow in a summer field may no longer survive at all.