The Ordnance Survey's first edition maps confidently marked a large circular enclosure at this spot, the kind of feature that would typically indicate a ringfort, a defensive or agricultural enclosure of early medieval date. By the second edition, the confident circle had softened into an irregular outline. Visit today, and the enclosure has vanished entirely, leaving behind only a small, steep-sided hillock with a rectangular summit measuring roughly 22.7 metres north to south and 7.7 metres east to west. A U-shaped structure sits at its northern end, but this appears to be of relatively modern construction. There is, in the assessment of those who have examined the site closely, no indication that an enclosure ever existed here at all.

The place carries the name Knockbathanawagga Fort, or in Irish, Cnoc an tSeanmhacha, and that name alone suggests something was once believed to be present. How the original mapmakers came to record a large circular enclosure is now unclear. It may have been a misreading of the natural topography, a local tradition that pointed to something no longer visible, or simply an error that propagated from one survey to the next before anyone checked the ground again. The archaeology of the Iveragh Peninsula, the broad southwestern finger of Kerry that includes this location, is dense and varied enough that a mistaken marking would not be difficult to make, particularly in the nineteenth century when surveyors were working across enormous tracts of unfamiliar landscape. A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, compiling their archaeological survey of South Kerry for Cork University Press in 1996, were among those who found nothing to support the original designation.