Locally, it has long been remembered not as a fortification or a farmstead enclosure but as a place where the dead were laid. Bones, by various accounts, have turned up within its interior over the years, lending the earthwork a weight that goes beyond its visible outline in the landscape.

A moated site is exactly what it sounds like: a roughly square or rectangular enclosure surrounded by a water-filled or partially water-filled ditch, common in Ireland from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, typically associated with Anglo-Norman settlement and agriculture. This one, however, accumulated a different kind of memory. The detail that it served as a burial ground came down through oral tradition, passed on to the current landowner by a local man who was born in the 1890s. That chain of transmission is short enough to feel almost immediate, yet old enough to suggest the knowledge was already well established by the time it was spoken aloud. Whether the bones found here belong to a period of formal burial, some episode of necessity, or something older still, nobody seems to have determined.