For years it was recorded as a moated site, the kind of defensive enclosure common in medieval Ireland, where a raised platform would be ringed by a water-filled ditch to protect a manor house or farmstead. Closer inspection suggests something quite different is going on here.

The enclosure is roughly trapezoidal in shape, measuring around 80 metres along its longer northwestern edge and narrowing to about 57 metres at the eastern end, with a bank and a fosse, which is essentially a dry ditch, running around much of its perimeter. The fosse has been partially infilled on the northern and eastern sides. Writing in 1977, a researcher named Barry catalogued it among moated sites, describing a flat platform with an internal bank up to 2.5 metres high and a dry moat roughly 3.3 metres wide. What that earlier assessment did not fully account for is the way the interior undulates considerably, sitting well below the level of the surrounding fields due to a natural dip in the terrain. That kind of irregular, sunken interior sits uneasily with the functional logic of a medieval moated platform. Current thinking places it instead as a designed landscape feature connected to Borrismore House and its demesne. Demesne landscapes of the post-medieval period in Ireland frequently incorporated earthworks, artificial contours, and planted enclosures as aesthetic or practical elements of estate design, meant to frame views, organise parkland, or simply give pleasing shape to a piece of ground.

The plantation of trees that now covers the site sits on that ridge with good views extending in all directions, which is itself a clue. Prospect and outlook mattered enormously to the designers of eighteenth and nineteenth century demesnes, and an elevated, planted enclosure with long sightlines fits that tradition far more comfortably than it fits the medieval record.