The answer, it turned out, was an ancient circular enclosure, the kind of earthwork that farmers across Ireland have long called a "fort", a term that covers a broad category of ringforts and enclosures that were typically used as defended farmsteads or settlement sites from the early medieval period onwards. The enclosure had been substantially levelled around the 1970s, yet it persisted, quietly, in the tilted geometry of a south-south-westward-facing slope on undulating ground that had long since been given over to tillage.

What remains is a near-circle of flattened earthen bank, measuring roughly 31 metres north to south and just under 33 metres east to west. The bank itself is wide, around ten and a half metres across in most places, though only a fraction of its original height survives, standing barely a quarter of a metre above the interior ground level. In the southern quadrant the bank has been further reduced to a simple scarp, a low step in the ground rather than a proper raised feature. Ten metres to the east sits a small slate quarry, around 20 metres deep, which hints at the industrial and agricultural activity that has shaped this corner of Tipperary over the centuries. The enclosure is unlikely to have survived the twentieth century undamaged had its presence been more widely recognised sooner; in the year it was recorded, the land was left fallow once the "fort" was identified, a small stay of execution for a monument that had already lost much of its original profile to the plough.