Cropmarks of this kind appear when buried ditches and earthworks affect how plants grow above them, with crops ripening at subtly different rates depending on what lies beneath, so that from the air the outline of something ancient suddenly becomes legible.

The enclosure itself is subrectangular in plan, roughly 70 metres along its north-west to south-east axis and about 35 metres across, with the south-west and north-west sides running straight while the remaining sides curve. A fosse, the term for a defensive or boundary ditch, traces its perimeter. There are two gaps in this perimeter: a wide one on the south-east side that likely served as a main entrance, and a second on the south-west side. The whole thing was captured in a single aerial photograph taken in July 1989. About 100 metres to the west, in the same field, a ring-ditch of a different character sits in the same landscape, and further linear cropmarks running across the area may represent the remnants of old field boundaries, long since levelled and lost to ordinary sight. The cluster of features suggests this corner of north Cork was once considerably busier than it appears today.