Spread across roughly ten hectares of farmland, a complex of rectilinear cropmarks, some running perpendicular to one another, hints at field boundaries that have long since ceased to exist as physical features. Cropmarks form when buried ditches or walls affect the moisture and nutrients available to crops above them, causing the vegetation to grow or ripen slightly differently; seen from altitude, those differences resolve into patterns that tell a story the ground itself no longer tells.

The aerial photographs taken in July 1989 as part of the Cork Archaeological Survey Air Photography programme revealed that what lies beneath Subulter is not a single coherent layout but probably at least two separate field systems, overlapping one another. That overlap suggests successive phases of agricultural organisation, one community's boundaries cut across or extended by a later one's. Adding further texture to the picture, a series of closely spaced parallel linear cropmarks may represent old routeways, the worn corridors between fields rather than the fields themselves. Two circular enclosures have also been identified within the system; circular enclosures of this kind in an Irish context are often associated with settlement, and their presence here raises the possibility that people were living within or alongside these organised agricultural plots, though no further detail about their date or character has been established for this particular site.

Because the features exist only as cropmarks, there is nothing to see at Subulter on a casual visit. The archaeology is legible from aircraft under the right conditions, typically in dry summers when crop stress makes buried features visible, and it remains otherwise submerged beneath ordinary-looking fields.