Circular enclosures of this type are a common enough presence in the Irish landscape; they range from the remains of ring forts, which were enclosed farmsteads used from the Iron Age well into the early medieval period, to later agricultural features whose origins are far more prosaic. The map mark alone is enough to plant a question.

When the site was examined in 1989, the answer proved elusive. The area had by then grown into a mature plantation, the close-planted forestry that covers so much of upland Wicklow, and whatever outline or earthwork may once have been legible on the ground had left nothing visible or measurable. No archaeological significance was recorded at that time. It is one of those cases where the cartographic evidence and the physical reality have drifted apart, and the 1838 map becomes the more interesting document, preserving a trace of something that may have been clearer to the surveyors who passed through than it is to anyone who followed them.