No earthen bank rises from the grass, no ditch breaks the surface of the pasture. The only evidence that anything is there at all comes from the air, where the soil itself betrays the outline of a structure that has long since been absorbed back into the ground. This is the particular strangeness of a cropmark site: the buried remnants of a fosse, the deep circular ditch that once defined the enclosure, cause the vegetation above it to grow differently, a detail invisible to anyone walking the field but legible, under the right conditions of drought and low sun, to aerial cameras.

The ringfort at Ballyseskin appears in aerial photographs taken in July 1968, which captured the cropmark of a roughly circular enclosure approximately 35 metres in diameter. A single fosse feature traces the perimeter, and a field bank running northwest to southeast bisects the circle, likely a later agricultural boundary that was cut straight across the older form without any awareness of, or concern for, what lay beneath. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when defined by earthen banks and ditches rather than stone, were the commonest form of enclosed farmstead in early medieval Ireland, typically associated with the period between around 500 and 1000 AD. The Ballyseskin example represents a modest specimen of the type. Archaeological testing carried out immediately to the south of the site, conducted by M. McCarthy, produced no related material, leaving the interior of the enclosure uncharacterised and its history largely unread.