The site had been listed in both the Sites and Monuments Record in 1991 and the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996 on the strength of features spotted in a single aerial photograph. Enclosures of that type can represent anything from ringforts to field boundaries of considerable antiquity, so the classification, cautious as it was, carried an implicit suggestion of deep history.

When fieldwork was eventually carried out as part of the New Survey of Clare Island, the picture turned out to be rather more ordinary, and in its own way more human. Paul Gosling, reporting in 2005, found that what the aerial photograph had captured were not ancient earthworks at all, but the remains of 18th and 19th century house clusters together with their associated paddocks, the small enclosed plots that families would have kept close to their dwellings for kitchen gardens, animals, or fuel storage. Clare Island, sitting in Clew Bay off the Mayo coast, supported a substantial rural population during that period, and the traces of that settlement, worn down and grassed over, were legible enough from the air to be mistaken for something far older. It is a reminder of how readily the mundane can be misread as the ancient when the only evidence is a shadow on a photograph.