The site at Ballynahinch, sitting just south of the townland boundary with Doonmoon, never made it onto the Ordnance Survey's historic maps, which makes the complexity of what lies beneath all the more striking. It exists, cartographically speaking, as though it never happened.

The site came to light not through excavation or fieldwork but through aerial photography taken on 3 November 1984, as part of the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West-Limerick gas pipeline survey. Aerial archaeology works by capturing what ground-level observation misses: subtle differences in soil colour, moisture, and crop growth can reveal the outlines of buried or levelled structures far more clearly from the air than from the ground. The BGE photographs, recorded at a scale of 1:5000 on Strip Map 4, Site 4/43, showed a complex of rectangular features consistent with an old field system, the kind of organised land division that could date to any number of periods in Irish history. A relic field boundary that does appear on the 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet was later identified in orthophotographs taken between 2005 and 2012, suggesting at least one element of the old landscape survived long enough to be recorded before fading entirely. By March 2015, a Google Earth orthoimage was still showing faint linear cropmarks in the southern part of the field, a last visible trace of whatever arrangement of boundaries or enclosures once organised this ground. Adding further interest, possible barrows, which are prehistoric burial mounds, lie roughly 100 metres to the east, recorded separately under the references LI040-116 and LI040-117.

There is nothing to see here in the conventional sense. The field remains in pasture, and without the aerial photographs for reference, the cropmarks visible in satellite imagery require some patience and a calibrated eye to pick out. The most useful approach is to consult the National Monuments Service record alongside freely available satellite layers; the March 2015 Google Earth image in particular shows the linear features in the southern quadrant when conditions are right. The site is on private agricultural land, so access would require landowner permission. The surrounding townland boundary with Doonmoon provides a useful orientation point when trying to locate the field, which sits immediately to its south.