Its existence is known almost entirely from the air, where the traces of former boundaries, divisions, and enclosures show up as cropmarks or soil patterns that centuries of agriculture have pressed flat but never quite erased.

The system came to light through aerial photographs taken by Michael Moore in the summer of 1996. Aerial survey of this kind works because buried features, whether the foundations of old walls or the ditches that once separated fields, affect how crops grow above them, leaving ghostly outlines that become legible from altitude, particularly in dry summers when the contrast between disturbed and undisturbed soil is at its sharpest. Moore's photographs, catalogued as MM (63) 6 and 7, captured enough detail to confirm the presence of a field system that would otherwise leave no obvious mark on the landscape. Field systems of this type can range in date from the prehistoric period through to the medieval, and without excavation it is rarely possible to say precisely when a particular example was laid out or abandoned.