It cannot be seen by walking the fields; it reveals itself only from the air, as a cropmark, the slight but legible difference in how grass or grain grows over buried features. Where a fosse, the defensive or boundary ditch that typically surrounds an early Irish enclosure, was cut into the subsoil and later filled in, the soil above retains just enough moisture and organic material to make the crop above it grow fractionally taller or greener. From altitude, that difference draws a circle.

The enclosure at Ballyadeen measures roughly 45 metres in diameter, a size consistent with a small ringfort or early medieval farmstead enclosure. A July 1989 aerial photograph captured its fosse as a near-complete ring, with a faint inner arc visible running from the north-east around to the south, suggesting the site may once have had a double boundary. The interior has been crossed and divided by field fences over the centuries; one, running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east, has itself since been levelled and is now also visible only as a cropmark, meaning the later agricultural landscape is dissolving into the same kind of invisibility as the ancient one beneath it. A second circular enclosure sits approximately 80 metres to the north, which raises the possibility that these were associated features, perhaps two enclosures functioning in relation to one another, though the nature of any connection remains unknown.

There is nothing to see at ground level, and that is precisely what makes the place interesting. The landscape of north Cork is scattered with sites of this kind, most of them unexcavated, their dates and purposes unconfirmed, their existence known largely because someone photographed the right field on a dry July day.