What was once a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead widespread in early medieval Ireland, has been levelled so completely that it survives only as a cropmark, a faint discolouration in growing vegetation that betrays buried features to a camera pointed downward from an aircraft. From the air, the outline of a roughly circular enclosure becomes legible; from the field itself, nothing.

The site was captured in aerial photography taken in July 1989 as part of the Cork Aerial Survey and Archaeological Project. What the photographs revealed was the ghostly plan of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort defined by an earthen bank and an external fosse, that is, a surrounding ditch. The enclosure measured approximately forty metres in diameter, a fairly typical scale for this class of monument. More intriguingly, a D-shaped feature was also visible as a cropmark within the north-eastern quadrant of the interior, lying adjacent to where the bank once stood. Such interior features within ringforts can represent the foundations of structures, souterrains (underground stone-lined passages used for storage or refuge), or subsidiary enclosures, though in this case the evidence goes no further than the crop differential recorded from the air.

The Scart ringfort belongs to a category of site that is perhaps more common than people realise: an archaeologically significant place that exists primarily as data rather than as a physical presence. Thousands of ringforts once dotted the Irish countryside, and a large proportion have been reduced by centuries of agriculture to precisely this, a pattern in the soil that only a dry summer and the right angle of light can bring briefly back into view.