It was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 as a clear, large ring in the landscape, but by the time the revised edition was produced in 1901 it had vanished from the cartography entirely, suggesting it was levelled sometime in that sixty-year window. What remains today is fragmentary and easily missed: a slight rise along the eastern edge, now absorbed into suburban garden plots, and a gently sloping scarp no more than a metre high on the western side, in the open field. The enclosure did not disappear so much as get swallowed, piece by piece, by the working landscape around it.

What makes the site particularly interesting is the uncertainty surrounding what it actually was. For a long time it would have been read as a ringfort, the circular earthwork enclosures, defined by a bank and ditch, that were built in their thousands across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically as defended farmsteads. But geophysical survey work carried out in 2006 complicated that interpretation. The survey, conducted by Harrison, identified a ditch-barrow immediately to the south-west of the enclosure. A ditch-barrow is a funerary monument of prehistoric date, defined by a circular ditch surrounding a central burial mound, and its proximity to the main enclosure was suggestive. Subsequent archaeological test trenching by Emer Dennehy, carried out the same year on behalf of Margaret Gowen and Co. Ltd., confirmed the barrow and raised the possibility that the larger enclosure itself might be a prehistoric ritual monument rather than a medieval settlement. The internal diameter of the enclosure, roughly forty-seven metres north to south and fifty metres east to west, with a bank approximately five metres wide, is consistent with ceremonial rather than domestic use, though no definitive conclusion was reached. Even aerial photography, in the form of Digital Globe orthophotos taken between 2011 and 2013, could only recover the cropmark of the western half, the portion not yet consumed by development. The eastern half, now beneath lawns and flowerbeds, has left no visible trace at all.