An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, is simply a defined area bounded by a bank, ditch, or wall, and such features survive across Ireland in enormous numbers, ranging from early medieval farmsteads to ceremonial sites. What made this pair of some interest was the relationship between them: the southern enclosure appeared to be intruding into the northern one, suggesting the two were not built at the same time but accumulated across separate phases of activity.

The northern enclosure was first identified on an aerial photograph taken on 16 July 1971, part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography. It was still visible on a later photograph from 13 July 1989. The spatial relationship between the two conjoined monuments, with the southern one seemingly encroaching on the northern, pointed to a sequence in which the northern enclosure came first and the southern was added, or perhaps imposed, at a later date. Clustered in the same general area were at least two further enclosures, one roughly 300 metres to the north-west and another about 260 metres to the west, hinting at a broader pattern of occupation or land use in this part of Kilkenny that once left a more substantial mark on the ground than survives today.

Sometime between 1989 and the present, both monuments were levelled entirely, along with the field boundaries that once lay to their north and east. Whatever was there is now gone, absorbed back into the working farmland. The aerial photographs remain the primary record of what existed, a reminder of how much of Ireland's archaeological landscape has been documented only in the moment before it disappeared.