From above, the cropmarks of a rectangular field system spread across roughly five acres, its boundaries defined by single drains, the kind of practical drainage layout that any nineteenth or twentieth-century farmer would recognise. But underneath that orderly grid, three smaller enclosures push through the soil as ghostly outlines, belonging to an altogether different period and purpose.

The rectangular field system itself is not especially old. It matches the field boundaries recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1839 and 1940, meaning it reflects the working agricultural landscape of relatively recent centuries rather than any prehistoric or early medieval arrangement. What makes Ringknock more interesting is what those later fields obscure. The three enclosures beneath them predate the OS mapping entirely, and their age and function remain unspecified in what has been recorded. Enclosures of this kind, small and roughly circular or sub-rectangular, appear across Ireland in many different contexts, from early medieval farmsteads to stock enclosures associated with ringforts. The cropmarks themselves, outlines visible in aerial photographs because buried ditches and banks affect how grass or grain grows above them, were captured in the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography image catalogued as BDI 93, which remains one of the primary ways such sub-surface features are identified across the Irish landscape.