These so-called cropmarks appear when buried features, a filled-in ditch, say, or the remnants of a wall, affect how overlying vegetation grows. Crops rooted above a former fosse, which is simply a ditch dug as a boundary or enclosure, tend to grow taller and greener than the surrounding field because the looser, disturbed fill retains more moisture. From altitude, the contrast becomes visible, and a circle that has been underground for centuries briefly reasserts itself in the pattern of a field.

This particular feature was recorded on aerial photographs taken on the 2nd of August 1996, which captured the ring-ditch as a cropmark defined by its surrounding fosse. The enclosure is modest in scale, roughly sixteen metres in diameter, placing it within the range of features often associated with prehistoric funerary or ritual activity in Ireland. Ring-ditches of this type are frequently the ploughed-down remains of Bronze Age burial mounds, where the outer ditch that once flanked an earthen mound is all that survives after centuries of agriculture have flattened the upstanding element. Without excavation, it is impossible to say with certainty what this particular enclosure represents, but the form is a familiar one in the Irish landscape, a quiet residue of early activity that the ground keeps rather than displays.