No map has ever recorded it. It does not announce itself. It became known only through aerial imagery and the eye of a single observer who noticed something that centuries of cartography had missed.

The site is a roughly circular enclosure, measuring 26 metres north to south and 27 metres east to west, and what marks it out at ground level is a low scarp, the edge of a raised platform, running around most of its circumference and standing between 0.3 and 0.4 metres high. An enclosure of this kind, a defined area bounded by an earthen bank or scarp, is a common enough form in the Irish archaeological landscape, associated with everything from early medieval settlement to ritual use, though pinning down a function without excavation is rarely straightforward. At Lavally, part of the southern edge has been levelled at some unknown point in the past, and the eastern side is barely legible, reduced to a faint widening of perhaps three metres. The interior rises very gently, with a slightly domed profile that is most noticeable along the north to south axis. Just outside the northern arc, a low undulation runs close to the scarp; it could be the trace of an outer bank, which would make the enclosure a more elaborate construction than it first appears, though it may equally be a later field boundary that simply happened to curve around the site. The two cannot be distinguished without further investigation. A stream runs about 100 metres to the west, and a farm shed sits just beyond a field boundary to the east, so the enclosure now occupies an ordinary working landscape that has pressed in around it from every direction.

The site was brought to attention by Jean-Charles Caillère, and because it appears in no edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, it belongs to that category of place that existed outside the official record entirely until someone thought to look from above. Standing inside it, with the valley opening slightly to the west and the drumlins rising on every other side, the scale of what has been almost erased becomes quietly apparent.