A low ridge, enclosing a roughly circular area of about thirty metres in diameter, is all that remains visible above ground. It would have attracted little attention had a proposed housing development not prompted archaeologists to investigate it more carefully, at which point what had seemed like an unremarkable scrap of raised ground turned out to conceal something considerably more layered.

The first test trenches were dug in 2000, and they revealed a fosse, the term for a ditch typically associated with early enclosures, nearly two metres wide at the top and over a metre deep, filled with silty loam and scattered flecks of charcoal. Further testing followed in 2003, and a full excavation was completed in 2004 by Moloney and Kirby. What they found was not the tidy outline of a single-period site. Beneath the ground was a series of ditches, arc-shaped features that resisted easy interpretation, and an area of burning. More telling were the finds within the primary fill of the main arc-shaped ditch: a sherd of green-glazed earthenware, a type of pottery associated with the post-medieval period, and a cereal grain assemblage, the remnants of stored or processed grain. Taken together, the artefactual and archaeobotanical evidence pointed not to the early medieval enclosures that such circular earthworks often represent, but to activity considerably later in date. The church and graveyard immediately to the north may themselves occupy the site of the medieval parish church of Rathcormack, which gives the whole cluster of features a long, if still partially obscure, history of use and reuse across many centuries.