For decades, those marks were taken as evidence of an ancient enclosure, the kind of circular or oval earthwork typically associated with early medieval settlement. In fact, what the map records is something considerably more recent and considerably more deliberate: a series of terraces laid out as part of the ornamental landscaping of a 19th-century country house.

The misidentification persisted long enough to make it into the Record of Monuments and Places in 1997, where the feature was formally catalogued as an enclosure. The error is a reminder of how easily designed landscapes can be mistaken for archaeological ones, particularly when the evidence survives only as earthwork and contour rather than as standing structure. Country house terracing from the 19th century was a widespread fashion in Ireland, used to create formal garden levels, improve views, and impose a sense of order on the immediate surroundings of a house. At Coorheen, what remains is the ground itself, shaped by that ambition and still legible, if faintly, in the lie of the land east and south of the house.