When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was drawn up in 1839, the enclosure sat within an area of woodland, its oval outline measuring roughly fifty metres across its longer north-west to south-east axis and about thirty-six metres across the shorter one. Enclosures of this kind, ringforts or related prehistoric and early medieval earthworks, were often absorbed into the landscape over centuries, their original function long since obscured. What makes this one quietly curious is what happened to it between maps.

By the time the revised Ordnance Survey map appeared in 1899 to 1900, the surrounding woodland had been cleared entirely. The enclosure itself, however, had been replanted or had retained its trees, so that what once blended into a broader canopy now stood out as a deliberate-looking grove, a ring of trees in an otherwise open field. This is a pattern seen elsewhere in Ireland, where the boundary of an ancient enclosure is preserved almost accidentally by the scrub or planting that takes root along its earthen banks, long after the original structure has lost any obvious social or ritual meaning to the people working around it. Some quarrying has also taken place in the south-eastern portion of the monument, which will have disturbed at least part of its original profile.