It exists, as far as ordinary perception is concerned, only from the air, betrayed by the differential growth of crops above buried features, a phenomenon known as a cropmark. When soil is disturbed to dig a ditch and then later filled in again, the ground retains a kind of memory; crops growing over the filled trench behave differently from those around them, greener or more parched depending on conditions, and under the right light the pattern becomes legible from altitude. Aerial photographs taken in July 1973 and again in July 2000 caught this one at just such a moment.

The enclosure is almost certainly a ring-ditch, a term used to describe the circular ditched features found across Ireland and Britain that are often associated with prehistoric funerary or ceremonial activity, though not always easy to interpret without excavation. What makes the Clintstown example particularly interesting is that it does not sit alone. A second ring-ditch lies roughly 130 metres to the east, and a third about 110 metres to the south-south-west, suggesting a cluster rather than an isolated monument. All three are associated with a co-axial field system in the same area, an organised landscape of parallel boundaries running in broadly the same orientation, though whether the field system and the ring-ditches belong to the same period of activity remains an open question. Co-axial field systems are generally thought to date from the Bronze Age or Iron Age in Irish contexts, but the association here is one of proximity rather than confirmed chronology.

There is nothing to see at ground level, which is itself worth noting. The land looks like ordinary agricultural land because, for all practical purposes, it is. The buried features survive beneath it undisturbed, at least as far as is known, visible only to aerial survey under the right seasonal conditions.