Three circular mounds, each roughly five to six metres across, show up as shallow ring ditches on survey data, and nobody is entirely certain what they are. They could be barrows, the low burial mounds characteristic of prehistoric funerary tradition, or they could be the worn-down remnants of circular livestock feeding troughs, an altogether more prosaic origin. The ambiguity itself is the point: the landscape here holds more than one possible past, and the ground has not yet given a clear answer.

The site came under scrutiny in 1999, when a stud farm on the land was being redeveloped. Before work proceeded, a digital terrain model was produced to capture the earthworks in detail, a decision that proved significant. Researchers Purcell and Gowen, writing in 2000, recorded the site, and subsequent analysis by O'Donovan and Duffy in 2002 drew attention to those three ambiguous circular features. The redevelopment itself, however, had practical consequences for the archaeology: the earthworks were partially buried under topsoil to make the ground safe for horses. Further to the south, aerial photographs taken by the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography in 1967 and again in 1971 had already revealed additional earthworks, and these are now interpreted as the probable remains of a deserted medieval settlement, a category of site found across Ireland where villages were abandoned, sometimes during the upheavals of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, leaving only faint marks on the ground. The two sets of features together suggest that this quiet corner of Tipperary was once a more populated and active place than its current appearance would suggest.