They cannot be seen on the ground. No earthworks survive, no stones protrude, no banks interrupt the grass. The only evidence for them appeared briefly in a satellite image taken on 23 March 2003, when particular conditions of soil moisture and crop growth cast faint shadows across the earth, outlining what analysts interpreted as the footprints of three hut sites lying side by side.

This kind of evidence is known as a cropmark. When buried archaeological features, old walls, filled-in ditches, or the remains of floors lie beneath a field, they affect how plants grow above them. Soil over a filled ditch retains more moisture and nutrients, producing lusher, taller growth; soil over a buried wall drains faster and produces paler, stunted vegetation. From the air, under the right conditions, these differences become legible as outlines. The three possible hut sites at Faha appeared in just such a window, positioned between two enclosures, the circular or sub-circular earthwork boundaries that so often accompany early settlement in Ireland. Later satellite imagery, including orthophotos taken between 2011 and 2013 and a further Google Earth image from April 2021, showed nothing at all. The 2003 image caught something that has not been visible since.

What this means in practical terms is that there is nothing to see at Faha in the conventional sense. The site is, for now, a matter of record rather than landscape. Its interest lies in what it suggests about how much early settlement activity remains invisible beneath ordinary Irish fields, waiting for a dry spring and the right angle of light to briefly announce itself.