For decades, the site existed only in the landscape itself, unremarked and uncatalogued, until an aerial camera passed over it in 1986 and the grass gave it away.

The enclosure was first identified during the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, when the pattern of crops growing unevenly over buried ground betrayed its outline as a cropmark, the term for the way differential soil moisture and buried features cause vegetation above them to grow at slightly different rates, creating shapes readable from the air that are invisible at ground level. What the survey recorded was a suboval shape, roughly 24 metres north to south and 19 metres east to west, sitting in wet, water-influenced pasture about 120 metres east of a watercourse. The monument does not appear on any OSi historic maps, which means it passed through the age of systematic cartographic survey entirely unnoticed. Later orthophotography from Digital Globe, taken between 2011 and 2013, and a Google Earth image from October 2015, confirmed it as a visible earthwork, no longer just a shadow in summer crops. Fifteen metres to the south lies a ring-barrow, a low circular burial mound of prehistoric type, suggesting the area carried significance across a long span of time. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly.

The site sits in working agricultural land, and the enclosure itself is subtle even when conditions are right. Earthworks of this kind are best appreciated through the aerial images held in the archaeological record rather than by standing in the field, where the slight rise and dip of the ground may be all that presents itself. Visiting the broader Friarstown area in dry summer conditions, when cropmarks are most likely to re-emerge, gives the best chance of noticing something in the landscape, though the ring-barrow to the south may be the more legible feature at ground level. Access to private farmland requires permission from landowners, and the waterlogged, water-shaped character of the pasture here means the ground underfoot can be soft well beyond the wetter months.