The camp is documented, painted, and written about in near-contemporary accounts, yet the ground itself has so far refused to give up the precise spot. That ambiguity is not simply a gap in the record; it is the direct result of industrial fertiliser applied to the ridge in the 1960s and 1970s. The 'basic slag' used there, a by-product of steel manufacture spread widely on Irish farmland in that era, contaminated the metal signal across the survey area so thoroughly that a licensed detection survey carried out in August 2006 came back inconclusive.

The camp belonged to Donough O'Brien, the Earl of Thomond, and it was one of three principal fortified encampments established by Crown forces during the Siege and Battle of Kinsale in 1601, one of the most consequential military confrontations in Irish history. A Spanish expeditionary force under Don Juan del Águila had landed at Kinsale and occupied the town; the Crown army under Lord Mountjoy moved to besiege it. Hugh O'Donnell, marching south through Munster with Gaelic Irish forces in a bid to link up with the Spaniards, was the threat the encircling camps had to guard against simultaneously. Fynes Moryson, who served as secretary to Mountjoy and left a detailed account of the campaign, records that the Earl of Thomond was ordered to take four regiments to the western side of Kinsale 'to invest the town more closely, and to keep O'Donnel and the Spaniards from joining together'. Lord President Sir George Carew and the Earl had only recently returned to Kinsale in late November 1601, having failed to intercept O'Donnell's march. A contemporary painting of the siege, now held at Trinity College Dublin, shows the camp on the western end of the Ardmartin ridge, and the relationship between the camp's depicted position, the Millwater and Ballinacurra streams, and the surviving seventeenth-century road network points to the height of Liscahane More as the most likely location. The position would have controlled a main approach road into Kinsale while offering clear sightlines north towards any incoming force.