What makes the site quietly remarkable is that its existence was confirmed not by excavation or fieldwork but by an aircraft passing overhead: aerial reconnaissance carried out in 1964 first revealed the outlines of what appears to be an organised field system, one that ground-level survey had not previously documented.

The photographs taken in 1964, catalogued under the reference CUCAP AJU 14, showed a spread of collapsed stone walls covering an area of roughly 260 metres by 230 metres. Within that space, the walls formed several rectangular enclosures, suggesting a planned layout rather than ad hoc boundary-marking. The most likely explanation is that these were working fields associated with the tower house that sits at their centre. Tower houses, the fortified stone residences that proliferated across Ireland between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, were typically the seats of local lords and landowners, and it would have been entirely usual for such a residence to be surrounded by managed agricultural land. When fieldworkers visited in August 1982, however, the site had become inaccessible, the walls buried under thick vegetation. Whether anything has changed since then is not recorded, and the full extent of what lies beneath the undergrowth remains unexcavated.