At ground level, the site is completely invisible. Only when viewed from the air does the landscape give itself away, revealing a cropmark, the faint differential growth in vegetation above buried soil disturbances, that outlines what appears to be a substantial enclosure.

The story of how this site has been understood is itself a small study in the limits of different technologies. The 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the most detailed cartographic exercises ever carried out in nineteenth-century Ireland, recorded it as a circular embanked enclosure with an external diameter of roughly 40 metres, sitting on a north-facing slope above a spur of land running southeast to northwest. An embanked enclosure is broadly what it sounds like, a defined area surrounded by an earthen bank, and they appear across Ireland in many periods and contexts, from early medieval farmsteads to ceremonial sites of much greater antiquity. But when aerial photography was later brought to bear on the site, the picture shifted. The cropmark visible in the photograph shows not a circle but a rectangle, with internal dimensions of approximately 30 metres on each side, and what may be either two parallel ditches, each around 2 metres wide, or a single wide moat of roughly 6 metres. The divergence between the two records raises quiet questions: were the original surveyors working from degraded surface traces that suggested a curve where none existed, or did the enclosure genuinely change form at some point in its history?

What remains is a site that exists more convincingly in archives and aerial images than in the field itself, a place defined almost entirely by absence and inference.