The distinction matters, because the evidence for it now amounts to little more than a cartographic memory. When the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map of this area in 1834, the surveyors recorded a circular embanked enclosure roughly thirty metres in external diameter and labelled it in the gothic lettering conventionally reserved for antiquities. That label, "fort", is the kind of designation applied to a ringfort, an earthen or stone-embanked enclosure of early medieval date, typically associated with a farmstead and its occupants. Thousands of them survive across Ireland, many still clearly visible in the landscape. This one, apparently, does not.

By 1968, when the site was visited and assessed, no archaeological feature remained visible at ground level. The land had been improved for pasture, a process that, repeated across the Irish countryside over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, erased a great many earthworks that had survived far longer conflicts and upheavals. The only trace noted at that visit was a slight kink in a field bank on the eastern side, a small irregularity in an otherwise ordinary boundary that might, just possibly, have reflected the curve of the original enclosure. Even that was gone by 1995. The ridge remains, the fields remain, but the fort exists now only in the 1834 map, drawn by surveyors who arrived just in time to see something that subsequent decades would quietly remove.