The Geological Survey of Ireland flight, reference S.651/650, captured what are known as cropmarks, the faint but legible lines that form in growing crops above buried features, where differences in soil depth or moisture cause plants to grow at slightly different rates. What appeared in those aerial photographs was a series of linear marks running on a northeast to southwest axis across a southeast-facing slope, tracing boundaries that no one walking the land today would ever notice.

The cropmarks are particularly telling in their relationship to the landscape around them. Two moated sites lie close by, one immediately to the northeast and a possible second example to the west. Moated sites are a class of medieval enclosure, typically a raised platform surrounded by a water-filled or wet ditch, associated in Ireland with rural settlement between roughly the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The field system cropmarks run along the southeastern sides of both these enclosures and appear to continue between them, suggesting the boundaries once formed part of an organised agricultural landscape that served, or at least coexisted with, those medieval farmsteads. The alignment of the buried boundaries also mirrors the existing field boundaries visible on the ground today, implying a degree of continuity in how this particular slope has been divided across the centuries.

The site sits in active tillage ground, and there is nothing to see from the surface. The cropmarks are not visible at ground level, and the field system exists, for all practical purposes, only in the aerial record and in whatever remains compressed into the subsoil beneath the plough line.