That dismissal, made during an inspection in the 1960s, turned out to be rather hasty. What survives is an ancient enclosure, roughly oval in plan, measuring some 39 metres north to south and 32 metres east to west, with the faint remains of a bank and a shallow outer fosse, the fosse being a defensive ditch typically dug to complement an earthen bank. On the western side, the ground had been deliberately built up to create a level platform, still standing to an external height of around 0.94 metres. That kind of deliberate terracing does not happen by accident, and it is difficult to reconcile with a simple cluster of trees.

The site appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1843, where it is shown as a roughly circular area crowned with trees, and again on the 1903 edition, this time rendered with hachures indicating an earthen enclosure. The tree cover that was visible to nineteenth-century cartographers may well be what led the inspectors from the Office of Public Works, recording their findings in a 1967 file, to conclude it was a tree-ring rather than something older. Earthen enclosures of this kind, sometimes associated with early medieval settlement or with ceremonial use, are common enough across the Irish midlands, but their subtle topography makes them easy to misread, particularly once the original earthworks have been levelled by agriculture or neglect. At Middlewalk, the levelling has done its work, but not quite enough to erase what was once a carefully constructed feature on a prominent hillside.