That uncertainty is, in its own way, the most interesting thing about it. The site exists in the archaeological record largely as a question mark, flagged as being of doubtful antiquity, which places it in an odd category of places that are neither confirmed monuments nor dismissed outright.

The site was identified not through excavation or ground survey but from an aerial photograph taken in 1974 as part of a Geological Survey of Ireland flight. Aerial photography has long been one of the more revealing tools in landscape archaeology; from altitude, the shadows and soil variations left by buried ditches, banks, and field boundaries can betray features that are entirely invisible at ground level. What the 1974 photograph showed at Coonmore was interpreted as a possible enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or rectilinear boundary that in Irish contexts can indicate everything from a ringfort to a field system to something with no human origin at all. The qualification of doubtful antiquity suggests that whoever reviewed the image could not rule out a natural or post-medieval agricultural explanation for the pattern observed.