Aerial photographs taken in July 1989 revealed a pattern of rectilinear cropmarks, some running perpendicular to one another, spread across approximately 30 hectares. Cropmarks appear when buried features such as ditches, walls, or pits affect the growth of crops above them, producing subtle colour differences visible from altitude but invisible at ground level. What emerged here was the outline of a relict field system, a network of boundaries that had long since vanished from the surface but left its geometry preserved just beneath the soil.

The large field containing most of these cropmarks appears on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map and was probably associated with the Renny estate. Within the same area, the aerial evidence hints at further complexity: a possible circular enclosure and a fulacht fiadh, the latter being a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a mound of burnt and cracked stone beside a trough or pit, are both tentatively identified within the field system. Cutting across all of this, a disused stretch of the Mallow to Fermoy railway line also shows up as a cropmark, its nineteenth-century trackbed now as invisible as the ancient field boundaries it crosses. The railway and the prehistoric enclosure, separated by millennia, have both been flattened into the same plane of agricultural ground, readable only as faint signatures in summer crops.