At Balgaddy, a pattern of boundaries and enclosures shows up as a crop mark, the kind of faint discolouration that appears in aerial or satellite imagery when buried features affect how plants grow above them. Soil disturbed or compressed by old walls, ditches, or banks will cause the vegetation overhead to ripen or stress at a slightly different rate to the surrounding crop, and for a brief window each season, what was hidden becomes briefly readable.

The site was identified through a Digital Globe orthoimage captured between 2011 and 2013, with the record compiled by David O'Connor and later updated by Christine Baker, uploaded to the Sites and Monuments Record in November 2014. The information drew on the SMR file and a personal communication from T. Condit. Alongside the field system itself, the imagery reveals a circular enclosure in the same field to the southeast, recorded separately under the reference DU004-056. Circular enclosures of this kind are a broad category in Irish archaeology, ranging from Bronze Age ring ditches to early medieval ringforts, and without excavation it is not possible to say with certainty what period this example belongs to. What the notes do make clear is the topographical setting: the fields face south and slope down from a local high point, with open views extending towards Knockbrack.

Balgaddy sits in an area of west Dublin that has seen considerable suburban development in recent decades, which makes the survival of any archaeological landscape here, even one that exists primarily as a satellite trace rather than a visible earthwork, worth noting. There is nothing to see at ground level in the conventional sense; the crop marks are not visible from a footpath or roadside, and the fields themselves are private agricultural land. The value of the site lies in what it represents rather than what it presents, namely a reminder that the land beneath ordinary-looking fields can carry a complex and much older pattern of human use, one that only becomes apparent when looked at from a sufficient distance.