Nothing breaks the surface to mark what is there; the outline emerges only from the air, in the particular language of cropmarks, where buried ditches and banks alter the moisture and nutrients available to plants above them, producing faint but legible patterns in a ripening field.

What aerial photography has revealed is a roughly circular enclosure approximately 47 metres in diameter, the remains of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort defended by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Ringforts were the typical farmstead of early medieval Ireland, occupied broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and many thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. At Gortnagross, the cropmark of the main fosse, the defensive ditch that would originally have surrounded the enclosure, traces the perimeter of the site. A second fosse is also visible from the air, appearing to the north-east, south-east, and running from south towards the north-west, suggesting the settlement was once protected by a double circuit of earthworks. A further aerial photograph picked up the cropmark of an internal bank, the raised earthen ring that would have stood just inside the ditch. Together these traces indicate a double-ditched rath, a form associated in the Irish archaeological record with higher-status occupants, though that interpretation requires caution when the evidence is limited to aerial observation alone.