It appears on aerial photography, faintly, and then disappears again depending on the angle, the season, and the year the image was taken. It is not marked on any Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, and its status as an archaeological monument remains genuinely uncertain. The possibility that it is simply a natural curving scarp, a geological fold in the hillside rather than anything built or dug by human hands, has not been ruled out. That ambiguity is, in its own quiet way, the point.

The feature came to light during examination of aerial photographs taken on 3 November 1984, as part of survey work associated with the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West to Limerick gas pipeline. At a scale of 1/10,000, the images revealed what appeared to be a substantial oval earthwork on pasture ground roughly 480 metres south of the hill's summit, which reaches 922 feet, or 281 metres, above sea level. A barrow, one of the rounded burial mounds common across Irish prehistoric landscapes, lies approximately 120 metres to the northwest, catalogued as LI049-265. That neighbouring monument is confirmed; this one is not. Later satellite imagery, including Digital Globe orthoimages taken between 2011 and 2013, and a Google Earth image from November 2018, each show only a faint trace, and other aerial photographs of the same area show nothing at all. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded to the national monuments database in October 2021.

The site sits in ordinary pasture land, and there is nothing on the ground that marks it out with any clarity. The feature is essentially only legible from above, and even then only under specific conditions, likely when soil moisture or crop growth creates a subtle difference in colour or texture over buried or disturbed ground, a phenomenon archaeologists call a cropmark. Visitors to the area will find the broader landscape of Duntryleague Hill more immediately rewarding, with the confirmed barrow to the northwest providing something tangible to locate. The earthwork itself, if it is one, remains provisional, a shape that only occasionally decides to show itself.