At Baun, on the edge of Kilkenny city where the N77 meets the Castlecomer Road, a circular earthwork enclosure roughly 30 metres in diameter was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 to 1840. By the time the revision came around in 1945 to 1946, it was gone, most likely levelled during the intervening century, perhaps during the working of the sand and gravel quarry that once occupied the field. The site sat quietly in that condition, a blank in the landscape, until a ring road project brought it back into focus.

Excavations in 2003, carried out by O'Hara and Tooher, were intended to investigate the monument before road construction proceeded. What complicated matters considerably was that the location plotted on the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996 turned out to be approximately 50 metres south-west of where the enclosure had actually stood, the result of an error when coordinates were transferred from the original OS mapping. When the excavation report was later re-examined with the corrected position in mind, something small but significant came into view: at the south-western edge of the enclosure, just at the limit of the road-take, excavators had uncovered a shallow clay-filled pit, only 40 centimetres across and 10 centimetres deep, containing faint traces of charcoal and cremated bone. A pit of that kind, modest as it is, suggests a burial or ritual deposit of some antiquity. The enclosure itself appears to have sat just outside the footprint of the new road, meaning it was not destroyed by the construction, though further quarrying activity around 2005, possibly connected to the same road works, disturbed the field once more. Satellite imagery from 2019 shows the land left fallow since.