Standing in the surrounding pasture, there is nothing to see: no earthen bank, no raised ground, no obvious break in the field. The site exists, in any practical sense, only from the air.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more circular earthen banks and ditches. Thousands survive across Ireland, but many more have been levelled by centuries of ploughing and grazing, leaving behind only what are known as cropmarks. These are subtle variations in the colour and growth rate of grass or crops above ground, caused by the buried remains of ditches and banks beneath the soil. The Graigue site shows up on aerial photographs as a circular enclosure roughly 40 metres in diameter, with faint traces of a possible outer feature extending to around 60 metres across. That outer ring, if it is indeed one, would suggest a more substantial enclosure than the single-bank variety, though the evidence at this stage remains tentative. The photographs that revealed it were taken as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, a programme that has been responsible for identifying numerous otherwise invisible sites across Britain and Ireland.