What survives instead is a ghostly trace, legible only from the air, and only under the right conditions: a dry summer, a growing crop, and a plane overhead at the right moment.

Cropmarks form when buried features alter the moisture and nutrient content of soil above them, causing the plants growing over them to mature at a slightly different rate or colour from the surrounding crop. Photographed from the air on 14 July 1970 as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, the Lyrath site revealed a curving trackway roughly 70 metres long, expressed as two parallel lines running in a roughly northeast-to-southwest direction. The trackway sits approximately 40 metres northwest of a ringfort, one of the small, circular, embanked enclosures built across Ireland from the early medieval period and still a common feature of the Irish countryside. The same aerial photographs captured two further rectilinear enclosures as cropmarks, at approximately 80 metres and 40 metres to the northwest respectively. Taken together, the trackway and enclosures suggest the buried remnants of an organised early settlement landscape, with the road perhaps connecting the ringfort to its surrounding agricultural or domestic features.