When the Ordnance Survey mapped this part of Wicklow in 1838, their six-inch map showed a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter on a gentle east-facing slope. Circular enclosures of this kind are a familiar feature of the Irish landscape, often the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built predominantly between the early medieval period and around the twelfth century, consisting of an earthen bank or stone wall surrounding a domestic area.

By the time a field inspection was carried out in 1990, the picture had changed considerably. What was found was an irregularly circular area roughly fifteen metres across, pitted with hollows and scattered with boulders, many of them split. The original diameter had apparently halved in what could be recorded, and any coherent structure had given way to a disturbed, pockmarked patch of ground in pasture. Whether the earlier map reflected a more complete feature, or whether the 1838 cartographers were working from older information or local knowledge that overstated the scale, is difficult to say. What remains is ambiguous: the split boulders hint at deliberate clearance or stone-robbing over generations, processes that have quietly dismantled countless similar sites across Ireland.