The cropmark, which is the differential growth pattern that buried features produce in cultivated soil, revealed the fosse, or defensive ditch, of an enclosure roughly 36 metres along its northeast to southwest axis and around 40 metres northwest to southeast. The straight edge of the D runs approximately 30 metres and faces north, with a field boundary sitting immediately beyond it in the same direction. These modest dimensions suggest a small, roughly oval or sub-rectangular enclosed space, the kind of site that might once have sheltered a farmstead, a religious precinct, or a high-status household, though the aerial photograph alone cannot answer which.

The photograph in question, taken on 14 July 1970 as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, caught the site during tillage, the very agricultural activity that, over centuries, would have erased any upstanding remains entirely. Cropmarks of this kind tend to appear most clearly in dry summers, when crops above a buried ditch, which retains moisture better than the surrounding undisturbed subsoil, grow taller and stay greener longer. The Kilree enclosure would have been entirely unknown from ground level, its ditch long since silted up and ploughed flat, leaving only that brief annual window of differential growth as evidence of its existence. Kilree itself is a townland already associated with early medieval activity, sitting near a round tower and high cross that point to ecclesiastical settlement in the area, which lends a certain plausibility to the idea that this enclosure, too, belonged to that broader landscape of early activity, though the aerial record alone cannot confirm a date.