There is no wall, no ditch, no upstanding monument of any kind. The enclosure exists only as a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried features beneath the soil cause the vegetation above them to grow differently, revealing their outlines when seen from the air under the right conditions. Dry summers tend to make these ghostly impressions most legible, as grasses and crops over filled-in ditches retain moisture longer and stay greener, while those over buried walls thin out and yellow early. The result, from altitude, is something close to a photograph of a vanished structure.

The site was identified from Digital Globe aerial imagery and recorded by Caimin O'Brien, drawing on details provided by Jean-Charles Caillère, with the record uploaded in November 2021. What the imagery shows is a roughly circular enclosure, the kind of form most commonly associated in the Irish landscape with ringforts, the farmsteads of the early medieval period, typically consisting of a circular area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Ringforts were built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries and once numbered in the tens of thousands across Ireland, though many have been ploughed flat or otherwise erased over the centuries. The Coolishal example shows the characteristic circular plan, though a field boundary running east to west cuts across its southern portion, suggesting that at some point the enclosure's outline was overwritten by later agricultural organisation of the land, without anyone necessarily knowing, or caring, what lay beneath.

Because the enclosure survives only as a cropmark, there is nothing to see on the ground in the conventional sense. A visit to the wider townland of Coolishal would be a quiet affair of ordinary farmland. The site is on private land, and the aerial imagery compiled with the record, including Google Earth orthoimages, is the most direct way to engage with what has been documented. Anyone with an interest in how aerial and satellite photography continues to expand the known archaeological record in Ireland will find the record worth looking up through the Historic Environment Viewer, where details of the compilation and the imagery reference are held.