The field has been ploughed, the earthworks largely levelled, yet a slight hollow depression and a curving bank or scarp, running west from the road and turning back northwards to meet a hedge, hint at what once stood here. It is the kind of site that resists casual observation; the land looks ordinary until you know what to look for.

The evidence for this earlier landscape came not from excavation but from the air. An aerial photograph taken in 1977 revealed cropmarks, the faint differential growth patterns in vegetation that can betray buried or disturbed ground, showing two large rectangular enclosures in the western part of the field and two smaller ones adjoining them. Rectangular field enclosures of this type are generally associated with settled agricultural communities rather than with the circular enclosures more commonly linked to early medieval habitation. A ringfort, the circular earthwork banks that served as farmstead enclosures throughout early medieval Ireland, lies roughly 300 metres to the southeast, with another enclosure about 500 metres in the same direction, suggesting a broader pattern of activity across this part of the landscape. The Down Survey map of 1655 to 1656, that ambitious mid-seventeenth-century mapping project commissioned by the Cromwellian administration to record Irish landholding, depicts a cluster of dwellings in this area, pointing to occupation that persisted well into the post-medieval period even as the earlier field system was falling into disuse.