What they saw, captured in aerial photographs taken on 3 November of that year for Bord Gáis Éireann, were the faint but legible outlines of cultivation ridges and drainage ditches cut into reclaimed pasture near Gormanstown, in the townland also recorded under the name Phillips.

Cultivation ridges, sometimes called lazy beds in the Irish context, are raised strips of worked soil separated by shallow furrows, typically formed by repeatedly turning earth by spade or plough to improve drainage and increase the depth of workable ground. The drainage ditches recorded here are thought to date from after 1700, a period when large-scale land improvement and reclamation was actively encouraged across Ireland under various landlord and colonial improvement schemes. What makes this site quietly curious is its near-total absence from the documentary record. It does not appear on Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, meaning it was either overlooked during the original surveys, already grassed over by the time those maps were made, or simply considered too unremarkable to record. The earthwork complex was identified as a potential site of interest only when Bord Gáis Éireann commissioned large-scale aerial photography at 1:5000 resolution, catalogue reference Site No. 040219, as part of infrastructure survey work. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded in May 2021.

By the time a Google Earth orthoimage was captured on 14 September 2019, no surface traces remained visible. What the image shows instead is rough ground crossed by linear drains running predominantly north to south and east to west, the practical legacy of whatever drainage work was carried out here over the past few centuries. There is nothing to see on the ground today in any conventional sense, and the site is not marked or signposted. Its significance lies less in what survives physically than in what the 1984 aerial photographs preserve: a brief, accidental record of field systems that were already disappearing into the improved pasture around them.