That absence is itself part of what makes this site worth paying attention to. The standard cartographic record, which historians and archaeologists rely on to trace the evolution of the Irish landscape, simply does not acknowledge it. Whatever took place here left marks on the ground but not on paper.

What the maps missed, aerial photography has since begun to reveal. Orthoimages captured by the Ordnance Survey of Ireland between 2005 and 2012 show rectilinear earthworks, that is, roughly rectangular ditches and banks arranged in a geometric pattern, in a field to the west of Bruff Hill, which rises to around 312 feet or 95 metres. Within the northern quadrant of these earthworks, the outlines of what may be buildings are faintly discernible. Taken together, the features suggest the remains of a clustered settlement, the kind of close-grouped rural community with associated field boundaries that was common in medieval Ireland, and which often grew up in the shadow of a ringfort. A ringfort, for context, is a circular enclosed farmstead dating broadly from the early medieval period, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch. One such monument, recorded as LI032-119, sits on Bruff Hill itself. The settlement earthworks were subsequently confirmed on Digital Globe imagery from 2011 to 2013 and on a Google Earth image dated 25 March 2017. The record was compiled by Caimin O'Brien, drawing on details provided by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly, and uploaded in November 2020.

The site sits in working pasture and is not formally accessible to the public. The earthworks are subtle at ground level; the kind of low, grass-covered undulations that are easy to walk across without registering as anything more than uneven ground. The aerial perspective is really the only one that makes the layout legible, so consulting the Google Earth or OSi orthoimage beforehand gives a useful sense of what the field actually contains. Anyone passing through Bruff with an interest in landscape archaeology might find it worth pausing on the western approach to the hill, scanning the field margins for the slight rises and hollows that, from above, resolve into something that once held people and their daily routines.