The farm buildings that stand there today have no obvious sign of what lies beneath or around them, yet the circular outline of an early medieval ringfort, roughly 26 metres across, was still legible enough in the nineteenth century to be recorded on the first Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland.

The 1842 OS six-inch map, the earliest systematic cartographic survey of the country, captured the site as a hachured circular enclosure, the standard notation used by surveyors to indicate an earthen ring or raised bank. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when formed from earthen banks and ditches, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a family farmstead and its outbuildings within a defensive or status-marking perimeter. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, but many others, particularly in areas of sustained agricultural activity, were levelled, built over, or absorbed into working farmland over the centuries. The Pluckanes example appears to fall into this latter category. By the time the site was catalogued, farm buildings had already colonised the interior and surrounding ground, leaving the archaeology inaccessible and the above-ground traces largely erased.