At Faulkland in County Monaghan, on the crest of a south-facing slope along a broad north-south ridge, there once stood an embanked enclosure of considerable presence. Roughly subcircular in shape and measuring approximately 45 metres north to south and 40 metres east to west, it was a raised area of ground defined by an earthen bank, a scarp, and an outer bank separated from the inner works by a fosse, which is a shallow defensive ditch. A causeway and entrance faced east-south-east, the causeway standing some 0.65 metres high with a top width of just over three metres. It was, in other words, a well-defined and purposeful landscape feature, the kind of enclosure that in Ireland often marks early medieval settlement, a farmstead or a place of local significance whose original function has long since become obscure.

When a surveyor recorded the site in 1968, these features were already described as slight traces, suggesting that even then the enclosure was in a diminished state. The outer earthen bank to the south-east and west had at some point been absorbed into an ordinary field boundary, the fate of countless earthworks across the Irish countryside as agricultural improvement gradually consumed older patterns in the land. By 1995, when the site was revisited as part of ongoing survey work, the enclosure had been removed almost entirely. Only that outer field bank, running from east-south-east to south-west, survived to mark where the monument had been. The earthworks that gave the site its shape, its entrance, its causeway, its inner and outer banks, were gone.