It did not vanish from the ground, however. Aerial photographs taken in 1966 revealed not just that earthwork but an unexpectedly complex scene: a sunken trackway, raised triangular earthworks, and an extensive system of field banks running off at various angles. The whole arrangement was still legible from the air in Digital Globe imagery captured as recently as November 2011.

The 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map offers the most intriguing clue to what any of this might mean. The earthen banks and enclosure were annotated there as an "Old Grave", a designation that suggests the cartographers, or their local informants, understood the sub-circular mound to be a burial monument of some kind, possibly a mound barrow. A mound barrow is a rounded earthen mound raised over a burial, a form of funerary monument found across Ireland from the Bronze Age onwards. Whether the annotation reflects genuine knowledge of earlier remains or simply a local tradition that had attached itself to the feature is now difficult to untangle. The situation is complicated further by the likelihood that at least some of the surrounding earthworks are not prehistoric at all. The sunken trackway, for instance, appears to correspond with the entrance avenue leading to Oldgrove House as shown on the same 1837 map, and the field banks may belong to the agricultural landscape associated with that estate, which no longer survives above ground. The result is a layered site where the genuinely ancient and the relatively recent have become difficult to separate without excavation.