Neither is visible from the road, or indeed from any ground-level vantage point. They only reveal themselves from the air, through the patient geometry of cropmarks, the phenomenon whereby buried ditches, banks, or soil disturbances cause overlying crops to grow at slightly different rates, tracing the outlines of vanished structures in contrasting stripes of green and yellow.

Aerial photography carried out in July 1989 recorded a regular pattern of rectilinear cropmarks across an area of roughly four hectares at Ballygrace, some running perpendicular to one another, and crucially, on different axes from the field boundaries still in use today. This misalignment is what makes the site archaeologically interesting. It suggests that the landscape here was organised, reorganised, and then reorganised again across distinct periods, with each generation of farmers laying their own logic over what came before. Within this layered field system, the cropmarks also point to at least two circular enclosures and a possible ringfort. A ringfort, known in Irish as a ráth or lios, was typically a farmstead of the early medieval period, enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and their presence here alongside the field boundaries hints at a settled, working agricultural landscape extending back well over a thousand years.