In July 1989, an aerial photograph caught it: a rectilinear field system rendered visible not by any surviving earthwork but by cropmarks, the faint differential in how crops grow over buried ditches and disturbed soil. What the photograph recorded were the outlines of fosses, the broad ditches that once defined boundaries, arranged in a roughly geometric pattern across ground that today gives no hint of anything unusual underfoot.

One of those field boundary fosses connects directly to an upstanding ringfort still visible at the site. A ringfort, for those unfamiliar, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used during the early medieval period in Ireland primarily as a farmstead. The fact that a field system fosse runs outward from this particular ringfort suggests the two features belong to the same agricultural landscape, laid out and worked by the same community, perhaps over several generations. Clustering around the field system, the same aerial photograph also revealed a collection of other enclosures and ring-ditches, the latter being circular ditched features often associated with prehistoric burial or ritual activity. The concentration of all these features in one area implies that this part of Kilkenny was a place of sustained human activity across a considerable span of time, its successive occupants leaving overlapping traces now legible only from the air.