The enclosure reveals itself only from the air, and even then only under the right conditions, appearing as a cropmark, a ghostly circular trace in the soil caused by differences in how vegetation grows above buried features. Where a fosse once ran, a ditch dug and later filled, the disturbed ground retains moisture differently from the surrounding earth, and in dry summers that contrast becomes visible as a faint ring in a crop field. The circle here measures roughly thirty metres in diameter.

The site came to light in July 1989, when aerial survey work captured the cropmark on camera for the first time. At that diameter, the enclosure falls within the general range of a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval field monument in Ireland, typically a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches and used as a farmstead from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries. The aerial photograph also recorded two parallel linear cropmarks running along the eastern side of the site and continuing southward toward a road, features that might represent field boundaries, trackways, or earlier land divisions, though the record does not go further than noting their presence. A second circular enclosure of similar size sits approximately thirty metres to the north, suggesting this small area of north Cork may once have held a cluster of enclosed settlements rather than an isolated one.