Captured on aerial photograph CUCAP AVL084, taken on 15 July of that year, the soil revealed what the surface had long concealed: a circular enclosure roughly 30 metres in diameter, its presence betrayed only by the cropmark of a fosse, the defensive ditch that would originally have ringed it. Cropmarks form when buried features affect the growth of crops above them, with ditches often producing lusher, darker vegetation as their infilled soil retains more moisture. The enclosure at Bramblestown is not even complete in the image; only the northern half of the ring is legible, because a field boundary running north-east to south-west cuts directly through the southern portion, obscuring or destroying whatever traces remained there.

What makes the photograph particularly striking is how much else it shows in the same frame. Two further enclosures are visible nearby as cropmarks, one roughly 220 metres to the north-west and another approximately 120 metres to the north-north-west. The clustering of such features across a relatively small area suggests this stretch of Kilkenny farmland was once a more densely occupied or organised landscape than its present appearance would suggest. The same photograph also records the cropmarks of field boundaries that appear on the 1899 to 1902 Ordnance Survey mapping but had been levelled from the ground by the time the aerial survey was flown, surviving only as faint signatures in the soil.