The evidence comes not from excavation or historical record but from a crop mark, the kind of ghostly trace that appears when buried features influence how plants grow overhead. Where old ditches or banks survive underground, the soil retains moisture or nutrients differently, and crops above them grow slightly taller or a different shade of green. Captured on a Digital Globe orthoimage taken between 2011 and 2013, these marks suggest a landscape that was once divided, managed, and worked in ways that left a permanent, if faint, impression.

The site was identified through analysis of that satellite imagery and noted in the Sites and Monuments Record for County Dublin under the reference DU014-111----. The information was compiled by David O'Connor and draws on personal communication from T. Condit, with the record later updated by Christine Baker and uploaded in January 2015. Alongside the field system itself, the same imagery appears to show an irregularly shaped enclosure within the same field, which may indicate a related phase of activity or an altogether separate period of use. The flat terrain at Stockhole offers little in the way of surface drama, which is part of why the aerial evidence is so valuable; there are no earthworks or upstanding remains to catch the eye at ground level.

Because the site is known primarily through remote sensing rather than fieldwork, there is little for a visitor to observe directly. The crop marks are only visible under specific growing conditions and from altitude, meaning the Digital Globe imagery remains the clearest record available. Anyone with an interest in the site would do better to consult the relevant entry in the National Monuments Service's Sites and Monuments Record than to attempt a visit in the hope of finding visible remains. What makes Stockhole worth knowing about is precisely that quality of absence, a place whose past is legible only at a remove, caught briefly in a satellite's field of view during an ordinary growing season somewhere between 2011 and 2013.