It is easy to overlook, and that is partly what makes it interesting. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was distinct enough to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey map of 1841 to 1842, drawn as a circular enclosure with reasonable confidence. By the time the surveyors returned in 1915, that clarity had faded; the feature was no longer as legible on the ground, suggesting that decades of agricultural use or simple neglect had softened whatever definition it once had.

Circular earthen enclosures of this kind are scattered across the Irish countryside, and their purposes varied considerably. Many are the remains of ringforts, known in Irish as raths, which served as enclosed farmsteads from roughly the early medieval period onward. Others may have had pastoral, ceremonial, or boundary functions that are now difficult to disentangle. The Derrindaff example is small even by the modest standards of the type; its internal diameter of just over ten metres and its bank, three metres wide but barely rising above the surrounding ground, suggest a site that was never especially imposing. Whether it was once a modest domestic enclosure or something else entirely remains an open question. It was documented as part of C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which catalogued many such features across a landscape that contains far more archaeological material than its quiet fields tend to suggest.