It was there in 1843, carefully recorded as a distinct circular feature in the undulating North Tipperary landscape. By 1904 it was gone, at least as far as the cartographers were concerned, and the field boundaries around it had shifted in ways that suggest the site was deliberately levelled when the land was reorganised. What the farmers who reshaped those fields may not have fully erased, however, is still faintly legible on the ground.

An enclosure of this kind would typically have functioned as a ringfort, a type of settlement common across early medieval Ireland, consisting of a raised interior platform enclosed by one or more banks and ditches. The Kilnaneave example sits at the base of a south-east-facing slope, a position that would have offered some shelter and, originally, proximity to a stream that once ran roughly east to west along the southern edge of the site. A field boundary now cuts straight through the enclosure on roughly the same east-west line, and south of that boundary nothing of the original earthwork survives. To the north, though, a raised area approximately forty metres in diameter can still be made out, its outline reinforced by a fosse, a surrounding ditch, roughly four metres wide and about thirty centimetres deep, shallow but still traceable if you know what you are looking for.

The survival of even this northern half is partly a matter of luck and partly of topography. The fosse is subtle enough that a casual glance across the field would likely miss it, but the slight elevation of the interior platform against the surrounding ground level gives the game away once you orientate yourself correctly. The stream that once defined the southern approach is no longer a feature of the immediate landscape, another change absorbed quietly into the working farmland of North Tipperary over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.