A set of rectilinear cropmarks, some running perpendicular to one another, spreads across roughly nine hectares of ground, outlining a field system that no longer corresponds to any boundary visible on the surface today. Cropmarks of this kind appear when buried features such as ditches or banks affect the growth rate of crops above them, producing lines of darker or lighter vegetation that only become apparent from aerial photography.

The pattern was captured in a photograph taken in July 1989 as part of an aerial survey, and what it revealed was a relict field system oriented on a completely different axis from the modern fields that now occupy the same ground. That misalignment is the telling detail. It suggests the earlier system was laid out according to a logic, perhaps topographical, perhaps territorial, that predates the present agricultural organisation of the land by a considerable margin, though the notes do not fix a precise period. A further detail sharpens the picture: one of the linear cropmarks crosses a separate circular enclosure nearby, doing so off-centre to the north. Circular enclosures in Irish archaeology often represent the remains of ringforts or similar enclosed settlements, and the fact that a field boundary cuts across one, rather than neatly avoiding it, implies a sequence of use across time, one arrangement of the land overlying or ignoring an earlier one.