That gap between what a place appears to be on paper and what it turns out to be on the ground is a quiet but recurring feature of Irish field archaeology.

The structure was recorded as an "Enclosure" in one survey in 1992, then reclassified as a "Barrow" in 1996, a designation that was still being carried on annotated maps as late as 1994. A barrow, in the archaeological sense, is a burial mound, and the reclassification would have implied prehistoric funerary significance. When the site was actually inspected in 1999, however, it was found to be a modern construction: a roughly circular wall measuring 18 metres north to south and 14 metres east to west, built from leaning drystone slabs. No ancient mound, no burial monument. The plateau setting and the form of the structure had apparently been enough, at a distance, to suggest antiquity where none existed.