The enclosure in question is visible only from the air, and even then only under the right conditions: a dry summer, when the buried remnants of a surrounding ditch, or fosse, cause the grass and crops above it to grow differently from the rest of the field. That faint circular mark, roughly ten metres across, is what archaeologists call a ring-ditch, the crop-mark trace of a small enclosed feature whose original purpose remains uncertain. Such sites are often associated with prehistoric burial or ritual activity, the fosse having once surrounded a mound or monument that has since been levelled entirely by centuries of ploughing.

The mark was captured in an aerial photograph taken in July 1989 as part of a systematic survey of Cork's landscape from above. What made the find particularly interesting was its context. Within the same field, and appearing in the same photograph, were two related features: another ring-ditch roughly fifty metres to the north-east, with what may be an entrance on its western side, and a circular enclosure about eighty metres to the south-south-east. All three sit within the faint traces of a relict field system, the ghost of an ancient agricultural landscape whose boundaries have otherwise disappeared at ground level. That clustering suggests this was not an isolated monument but part of a broader organised use of the land, likely spanning a considerable period of prehistory or early history.