The only reason we know it is there at all is a photograph taken from the air on 13 July 1989, on which the buried feature announced itself as a cropmark, a phenomenon in which buried ditches or walls affect how crops grow above them, causing faint but legible differences in colour and height when viewed from altitude. What the photograph captured was, in effect, the ghost of a boundary.

Cropmark enclosures of this kind are frequently associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, though they can range in date from the prehistoric period onward, and without excavation it is impossible to say what this particular circle once enclosed. A dwelling, a farmstead, a ritual space; the form alone does not settle the question. The aerial photograph that revealed it, referenced as GB89.Q.29, also picked up traces of an adjacent field system nearby, its boundaries running east to west and north to south in a grid-like pattern that may or may not relate to the enclosure. A second enclosure of similar type lies roughly 300 metres to the east-north-east, raising the possibility that this part of Kilkenny was, at some point, a more organised and inhabited landscape than its current agricultural plainness suggests.