For years they appeared in national records simply as an "Enclosure", a catch-all category that often signals something ancient and archaeologically significant. When someone looked more closely in 1997, the reality turned out to be rather more modest, and in its own way more interesting: a pair of animal pens, roughly subrectangular in shape, measuring approximately fifteen and eighteen metres across, each defined by a single course of well-built drystone walling.

Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and relies entirely on the careful selection and placement of stone, has been a feature of the Irish rural landscape for centuries, and enclosures of this kind were a practical element of everyday farming life. What makes this site worth noting is the gap between its recorded identity and its physical reality. Listed as an enclosure in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and again in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, it was only on field inspection five years after that first listing that the two pens were properly identified for what they are. The phrase "well-built" in the field description is telling; these were not hurriedly thrown together but constructed with the kind of care that suggests they were meant to last and to function reliably, likely for containing livestock on ground that slopes just enough to make management of animals a practical consideration.