It is easy to miss, and for decades it existed only as a smudge on an aerial photograph, its purpose and even its reality uncertain.

The enclosure first came to official attention through an Air Corps aerial photograph taken in 1957, where its outline was faint enough to be logged only as a possibility. It was formally listed as a rectangular enclosure in the early 1990s, but it was not physically inspected until 1997, when a ground survey confirmed what the photograph had suggested. The structure measures roughly 22 metres north to south and 19 metres east to west, defined by walling that has since collapsed into its constituent parts: single stone flags set on edge, a relatively simple construction technique associated more with field boundaries and agricultural enclosures than with the elaborate drystane work of earlier periods. That detail, combined with its likely date of after 1700, places it outside the more storied tradition of early medieval ringforts and cashels that populate the Irish landscape. It is, in all probability, a post-medieval working enclosure of some kind, modest in ambition and now thoroughly ruinous.

What makes it quietly interesting is less what it is than how it came to be known. The gap between that 1957 photograph and the 1997 inspection is forty years of something noticed but not yet checked, a category of place that archaeology accumulates in abundance: recorded, listed, visited eventually.