On the Ordnance Survey six-inch sheets of County Offaly, a small mound is marked consistently, sitting roughly 180 metres north of Kilclonfert Church and Castle. By 1981, a site visit found nothing at ground level: flat, rushy, poorly drained land, with no surface trace of whatever had once been there.

When an observer recorded the site in 1942 under the Irish Tourist Association Survey, it was classified tentatively as a fort, though even then its identity was uncertain. The surveyor noted a nearly filled fosse, a shallow encircling ditch about 2.4 metres wide, and a clay bank that rose roughly 0.9 metres on the outside and less than half a metre on the inside. The interior was level and circular, with an internal diameter of around 5.5 metres, and a ring of old thorn trees grew along its edge. The surveyor was candid about the difficulty of reading it: the position, at the base of a marshy, peaty valley with a restricted view, seemed wrong for a defensive fort. He also ruled out a crannog, which is a man-made island settlement typically built in shallow water, and dismissed the idea of a plantation-era earthwork. What he was left with was uncertainty. A bowl-barrow is a type of prehistoric burial mound, usually a low rounded heap of earth covering one or more interments, and the current classification edges the site towards that interpretation, though without excavation the question remains open. By 1981 even the physical evidence had gone, the mound levelled and the fosse filled to the point of invisibility, leaving only the map record and a 1942 description of thorns growing on a clay bank in boggy Offaly ground.