No map has ever recorded it; neither the Ordnance Survey's six-inch edition of 1837 nor the revised twenty-five-inch edition of 1913 shows any trace of it. The landscape simply absorbed whatever was there, and the fields moved on.

When the site was described in 1981, what surveyors found was an extensive pattern of earthworks that may represent a medieval settlement. The interpretation is cautious by necessity. Some of the ridges and hollows sit on the higher, drier ground and are considered potentially archaeological in origin, while others on the lower, wetter areas read more like the remnants of old drainage works, the kind of practical earthmoving that farmers have carried out across Ireland for centuries. Disentangling one from the other without excavation is difficult. What lends the site its historical weight is what stands 190 metres to the south-south-east: an Anglo-Norman motte and bailey castle. A motte and bailey is an early castle form introduced to Ireland following the Norman invasion, consisting of a raised earthen mound, the motte, topped with a timber or stone tower, beside a lower enclosed courtyard, the bailey. The proximity of a possible settlement to such a fortification is consistent with patterns seen elsewhere in medieval Ireland, where communities often developed in the shadow of Norman strongholds.