You would walk straight over it without any sense that anything was there. The only real evidence for its existence comes from a single aerial photograph, reference CUCAP BDQ 66, in which the buried ditch shows up as a cropmark, the kind of faint discolouration in growing vegetation that reveals subsurface features when seen from the air under the right conditions. Cropmarks form because soil disturbed by ancient ditches or pits retains moisture differently from undisturbed ground, causing crops above those features to grow at a slightly different rate, and so to change colour in dry weather. It is one of the quieter ways that archaeology announces itself.

The enclosure, a single-ditched circular form, belongs to a type common across Ireland during the early medieval period, though a precise date for this particular example has never been established. Such enclosures, sometimes referred to as ring-ditches or, when associated with settlement, as raths, were used for a range of purposes including habitation, livestock management, and possibly ceremonial activity. What is known about Coldwinters is limited but telling. The aerial photograph showed that the eastern arc of the enclosure had already been cut through by later field boundaries, suggesting that by the time the landscape was being reorganised into the familiar pattern of hedged or walled fields, the enclosure's original function had long been forgotten. At some later point still, part of the area was absorbed into a golf course. A test excavation carried out in 2005 under licence number 05E0236, with results reported by Tierney, failed to identify the feature on the ground, which may indicate that truncation and subsequent land use had severely reduced whatever physical traces remained below the surface.

There is nothing to see at ground level, and that is perhaps the most honest thing to say about a visit here. The location sits within a landscape that has been repeatedly altered, first by field division, then by recreational development. Anyone with a serious interest in the site would do better to track down the CUCAP aerial photograph through the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography archive, where the cropmark is at least legible, than to expect any visible remains in the field. The value of Coldwinters as a site lies less in what can be experienced on the ground and more in what it illustrates about how archaeological knowledge is built, sometimes on the flimsiest of photographic evidence, and how easily the physical record of early settlement can be erased by the ordinary business of later centuries.