When those surveyors were methodically recording the Irish landscape for the first edition of their six-inch maps, this roughly square earthwork went unnoticed, or at least unrecorded, which is itself a quietly interesting fact about how much the nineteenth-century survey still managed to miss.

The enclosure sits on a gently southward-facing slope, with a stream running east to west about thirty metres to the south, set within ordinary pastureland. It measures 13.6 metres north to south and 15.5 metres east to west, making it small enough that you might cross it in a dozen strides. The boundary is a low, rounded earth and stone bank with a crest width of 1.7 metres and a base width of 2.2 metres; it stands only 0.23 metres above the interior ground level, though it rises to 0.63 metres on the outer face. The corners are rounded rather than sharp, giving the whole structure a softened, organic outline. There is no visible fosse, the external ditch that typically accompanies such earthworks, which may say something about its original function or simply about how much time has flattened the surrounding ground. Enclosures of this kind are broadly prehistoric or early medieval in date, though without excavation it is impossible to say more precisely when this one was built or what it was used for.

What the site does show clearly is its more recent life as a convenient dumping ground. A considerable quantity of stone is scattered across the interior, the accumulated result of farmers clearing the surrounding fields and tipping the debris inside the bank. Small trees have taken hold on the bank itself and in the interior of the south-east quadrant, gradually stitching the old earthwork into the hedgerow landscape around it. The monument survives, but only just, and the distinction between ancient boundary and modern field-clearance pile has become pleasingly, if somewhat mournfully, blurred.