Sitting on the summit of a low hillock in gently rolling countryside, it is the kind of feature that a person could walk past, or even across, without any sense that something old and deliberate lies beneath their feet. That invisibility at ground level is itself quietly telling. Enclosures of this type, circular or subcircular earthworks that once defined a farmstead, a ritual space, or a place of assembly, can survive for centuries as subtle earthen banks and ditches, readable only from above, from the air or from satellite imagery, where the slight variations in soil and vegetation give them away.

What makes this particular site additionally curious is that it was absent from the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the great Victorian cartographic project that recorded Ireland's landscape in extraordinary detail during the nineteenth century. Antiquities of many kinds, raths, ringforts, standing stones, were marked on those sheets as a matter of course, which makes their omission of this hilltop enclosure notable. Whether it was simply overlooked by the surveyors, or whether it had already degraded to the point of invisibility by that period, is difficult to say. Its presence was eventually documented in the Archaeological Inventory of County Tipperary, compiled by Jean Farrelly and Caimin O'Brien and published in 2002, drawing on fieldwork and aerial evidence that the original mapmakers never had access to.