The field system at Foulksrath was not uncovered by excavation or stumbled upon by a farmer's plough; it was spotted from an aircraft, its outlines pressing faintly through the soil of working agricultural land in a way that centuries of cultivation had obscured but not entirely erased.

The site was identified through aerial photography carried out in the early 1970s, with images taken in July 1971 and again in July 1973. Crop marks and soil discolouration, the kinds of subtle signatures that reveal buried features when viewed from altitude, gave away the presence of a structured field system in what is otherwise ordinary tillage ground. What makes the wider area still more suggestive is the presence of numerous ring-ditches nearby. Ring-ditches are the circular crop mark remains of prehistoric monuments, often the ploughed-down remnants of burial mounds or enclosures, and there are a considerable number of them recorded in the vicinity of this field system. That clustering of features points to a landscape that was organised, inhabited, and treated as significant over a long period, even if the precise dating of the field system itself has not been established from the aerial evidence alone.

The Nore valley, with its relatively fertile soils, has clearly attracted settlement across many periods, and what survives here is less a monument in any visible sense than a set of faint impressions, a record kept not in stone or timber but in the long memory of the ground itself.