Others exist only as faint discolourations in a field of ripening grain, visible for perhaps a few weeks each summer and detectable, in any meaningful way, only from the air. The large polygonal enclosure at Scart in north County Cork belongs firmly to this second category. Measuring approximately seventy metres east to west, it left no surface trace substantial enough to survive the centuries of farming above it, but when an aerial survey photographed the area in July 1989, the buried ditches or banks betrayed themselves as cropmarks, the differential growth of crops over disturbed subsoil revealing the shape of something that had long since ceased to be visible at ground level.

The photograph captured an incomplete outline: a gently curving northern side connecting linear eastern and western flanks, a short section extending south-westward from the base of the eastern side, and what appears to be an entrance at the north-east corner. Cropmarks of this kind typically indicate the filled remains of a ditch or the compressed soil of a former bank, both of which would once have formed the boundary of an enclosed settlement or ritual space. Polygonal enclosures are less common than the circular or oval ringforts that dominate the Irish early medieval landscape, which makes this one worth noting even in its fragmentary state. A modern field fence cuts across the interior on a roughly north-south axis, a small reminder of how completely later agricultural patterns have been laid over earlier ones. Additional linear cropmarks lie immediately to the east, and a possible second enclosure sits around fifty metres to the north, while a field system occupies the next field to the south, suggesting that this part of Scart preserves traces of a wider organised landscape whose full extent remains unclear.