What makes the site quietly odd is the gap between the documentary record and what the ground actually shows. A 1307 extent of lands belonging to Joan, Countess of Gloucester and Hertford, lists a remarkably domestic collection of structures inside the enclosure: a hall, a chamber, a dairy, a grange, a bretage (a timber fortified gatehouse or outwork), assorted wooden buildings, and a dovecote. It reads less like a castle than a working estate, yet the earthwork that survives is substantial enough to suggest something much older underneath.

The scholar G. H. Orpen, writing in 1909, described the monument as a very large circular fort with a deep ditch and inner bank, traces of a rectangular tower on the bank, and what appeared to be a wall cutting the fort roughly in half. A smaller enclosure lying about twenty metres to the north-east caught his attention too. He conjectured that this smaller feature was the bretage mentioned in the 1307 extent, and that the larger fort, which he tentatively identified as the original Dun Fearta, had been pressed into service as the enclosure for the manor buildings recorded by the jurors. Dun Fearta, meaning roughly "fort of the grave mound" in Irish, hints at a still earlier significance for the site, one that predates any medieval countess. By the time a field inspection was carried out in May 1997, however, none of the buildings Orpen described could be identified on the ground. Whether they had simply disappeared into the soil or were never as visible as his account suggested, the inspection passed over them without comment, leaving Orpen's careful reconstruction suspended between the document and the earth.