The only way it has ever been seen is from the air, where the buried fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch cut into the earth in prehistory or the early medieval period, betrays itself through a cropmark, a subtle variation in the colour and growth of crops caused by differences in soil moisture and nutrients along the line of the buried feature. This ring-ditch, recorded on aerial photograph GB89.Q.37, is the kind of site that exists only as a shadow, a ghostly outline pressed into the landscape and legible only under the right conditions of drought, light, and altitude.

What makes the Connahy area particularly striking is that this ring-ditch is far from alone. The same stretch of countryside has yielded cropmark evidence for several other ring-ditches, a number of enclosures, and a field system, all identified through aerial survey. Ring-ditches of this kind are generally interpreted as the remains of ploughed-out burial mounds or small enclosed features from the Bronze Age or Iron Age, though some may have served other purposes. The clustering of such features here suggests that this part of Kilkenny was a place of sustained human activity across a long span of time, its monuments now reduced to faint signals readable only from above.