It was not spotted by someone walking the land, but by a camera mounted in an aircraft passing overhead on a July day in 1989. The photograph, taken on 14 July of that year, captured what archaeologists call a cropmark, a phenomenon in which buried ditches or banks alter the growth rate of the crops above them, leaving faint rings or lines legible only from altitude. In this case, the mark revealed a ring-ditch, a circular ditched enclosure that in Irish prehistory is most commonly associated with funerary or ritual activity, sometimes the trace of a burial mound whose earthen body has long since been ploughed flat.

What gives the site a particular quality is that it does not stand alone. The aerial photograph placed this ring-ditch as the southernmost of three such features aligned roughly north to south, each spaced somewhere between sixty and seventy metres from the next. A fourth ring-ditch lies approximately a hundred and sixty metres to the north-north-west. The regularity of that spacing and alignment, four monuments distributed across a modest stretch of farmland, suggests this was once a purposefully organised landscape, a cluster of sites that would have related to one another in ways that are now difficult to reconstruct. Whether they are broadly contemporary or represent repeated use of the same area across generations, the aerial evidence alone cannot say.