It was mapped in 1936 on the Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet as an arc of scarp running from north-west to north-north-east, the kind of hachured marking that surveyors used to indicate a sharp change in ground level. Whether whoever drew it believed they were recording an earthwork made by human hands is not entirely clear, because what survives today is, at least in part, simply the land doing what land does.

The scarp itself is still visible as a steep fall of ground, and in places the bedrock breaks through the surface. That exposed rock complicates any straightforward reading of the feature as a constructed earthwork. It may be that the arc of raised ground was shaped or used by people at some point, or it may be that a natural geological formation was mistaken for, or loosely grouped with, the kind of earthworks that do appear throughout this part of Cork. Earthworks as a category cover a wide range of things, from the ditched enclosures of ringforts to field boundaries and defensive banks, and the cartographic record alone is rarely enough to say which kind of thing you are looking at.