The photograph, taken on 22 July 1963 as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography (reference CUCAP ADI081), revealed a curvilinear cropmark outlining the northern, eastern, and southern arc of an enclosure roughly 50 metres in diameter. Cropmarks of this kind appear when buried ditches or banks, known as fosses, affect how crops grow above them; soil disturbed by ancient digging retains moisture differently, causing the plants overhead to grow at a slightly different rate, and the contrast becomes briefly legible from the air under the right conditions.

The fosse traced here is the defining remnant of what was likely a ringfort or similar enclosed settlement, the kind of circular enclosure built across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards, used as farmsteads and places of habitation. The western portion of the monument is cut through by a field boundary running roughly north-north-east to south-south-west, and a second field boundary branches from it eastward through the southern section, meaning centuries of agricultural reorganisation have quietly dissected what remains. Approximately 110 metres to the north-north-east lies a separate monument, possibly a barrow, a type of prehistoric burial mound, which hints that this corner of Kilkenny may have drawn human activity across multiple periods.