What makes the site at Newtownstaballen quietly remarkable is that its existence was only confirmed in 2023, not through excavation, but through a gradiometer survey, a technique that detects subtle variations in the soil's magnetic properties and can reveal ditches, drains, and earthworks that have long since been ploughed flat or silted over.

The survey, carried out under licence 23R0172 by D. Murphy, revealed a complex arrangement of three roughly concentric fosses, the term for ditches typically associated with enclosures or defensive boundaries, nested within a larger D-shaped area measuring approximately 110 metres east to west and 90 metres north to south. The outermost of the three enclosures connects to this D-shaped perimeter, whose ditch swings around to the east and south-east before trailing off to the west, where it appears to dissolve gradually into a field system complete with drainage channels running southward. Smaller field drains branch off from the innermost subcircular enclosure as well, dividing the interior into modest plots of roughly 30 by 20 metres; a scale that suggests careful, deliberate land management rather than anything monumental. Further to the east, a separate set of straighter north-south and east-west features likely belongs to a post-medieval drainage system that was never formally mapped. Running across the whole arrangement, indifferent to what lies beneath it, is a service road built to serve the Drogheda Cement Factory, cutting through the enclosures on a north-north-west to south-south-east line and serving as a blunt reminder of how much can be severed before a site is even recognised.