It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey's historic maps. It leaves no trace on the surface of the land. The only reason anyone knows it exists at all is because a gas pipeline happened to pass nearby in the 1980s, and somebody thought to look at the photographs taken from the air.

The site, recorded as Site No. 040274, was identified from aerial photographs shot on 3 November 1984 as part of survey work carried out for the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West to Limerick gas pipeline. Scrutiny of that imagery revealed a small circular cropmark in what is now reclaimed pasture, set within a broader field system. A cropmark forms when buried features, such as the filled-in ditch of a former enclosure, affect how crops or grass grow above them, producing subtle variations in colour or height that are invisible at ground level but legible from the air. The circular shape here is consistent with the kind of prehistoric or early medieval enclosure, a defined space once bounded by an earthen bank and ditch, that dots the Irish landscape in various states of survival. This one has fared poorly above ground. Orthophotographs taken by Ordnance Survey Ireland between 2005 and 2012 show nothing, and Google Earth imagery from as recently as 14 September 2019 reveals no surface remains whatsoever. The record was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded in April 2021.

There is, in practical terms, very little to see at Ballincolloo. The site sits in private agricultural land, and without the specific aerial photograph from the 1984 pipeline survey, there would be nothing to distinguish this particular patch of pasture from any other. The value of the place is less in visiting it than in knowing it exists, a reminder that the Irish countryside holds a great deal of archaeology that has been quietly pressed into the soil, erased from maps, and only occasionally glimpsed when the light and the season and an aircraft's angle happen to coincide.