What had apparently been a large embanked stone circle, a type of prehistoric monument defined by a circular earthen bank set with upright stones, had been quietly dismantled during the construction of the Limerick-Cork mail road in the early 1830s. The road builders took the stones, the bank was levelled, and the circle, which may have measured around 230 feet in diameter, became a faint depression in a field just 550 metres west of Lough Gur in County Limerick.

Professor Robert Harkness visited the area in 1869 and found only a cup-shaped hollow of roughly 210 paces across, along with a few large blocks of stone arranged in a double row nearby. He was uncertain whether the depression was natural or artificial, though later interpretation has leaned towards it being the ghost of an embanked circle. A more detailed account from 1895, published by Lynch, described a circle of two hundred and thirty feet with traces of a surrounding rath, a type of enclosed ringfort, and an avenue of stones approaching from the north-east. Thirteen stones of that avenue were still visible then, irregularly placed and many of them partly buried. By 1927, the revised Ordnance Survey map at least acknowledged the site, marking it as a "Stone Circle (Site of)" with a hachured oval platform. Peter Harbison, writing in 1970, raised the possibility that the monument might originally have been a megalithic tomb rather than a circle, and the question has not been entirely settled since. What is not in doubt is that the site sat within an exceptionally dense cluster of prehistoric remains; two other stone circles lie 150 metres to the east, standing stones are visible to the north-east, and the well-known Grange embanked stone circle stands only 150 metres to the south-south-east.

On the ground today, no stones mark the spot. The outline of an oval earthwork, approximately 85 metres north to south and 62 metres east to west, is detectable on aerial photography, though post-medieval field boundaries and cultivation ridges running north to south have further obscured the plan. The site sits in grassland immediately west of the main Limerick-Cork road, and any visitor coming to this area is more likely to be drawn first to the large and well-preserved Grange circle to the south. A remnant stone avenue, with a small setting of orthostats, the upright stones that once lined such approaches, survives to the south-south-east and is catalogued separately. For those with patience for what is absent rather than present, the flattened oval in the field carries its own particular weight, set as it is among so many other monuments that also survive only as outlines or memories.