What gives it an understated intrigue is precisely how little fuss it has attracted over the centuries. When the Ordnance Survey first mapped this part of Ireland at six inches to the mile in 1840, the feature was not depicted at all, suggesting it was either obscured by vegetation, already so reduced as to be overlooked, or simply not considered significant enough to note.

By the time the more detailed twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey edition was produced in 1897, the earthwork had made it onto the map, recorded as a roughly circular enclosure approximately twenty-two metres in diameter. A bank survives from the south-west around to the north-east, while the remainder has been reduced to little more than a scarp, a low slope in the ground where a more pronounced feature once stood. Circular enclosures of this kind are common in the Irish landscape; they include ringforts, which served as enclosed farmsteads from roughly the early medieval period onwards, though without excavation it is difficult to assign a firm date or function to any individual example. What the Spittle earthwork does retain is a faint circular cropmark visible on Google Earth satellite imagery, the buried remnants of the bank producing a slightly different rate of growth in the grass above, legible from altitude even when nearly invisible on the ground. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded in November 2021.

The site lies in upland pasture immediately east of the townland boundary with Ballynacourty, about a hundred metres south of a large forestry plantation. Access is across farmland, so the usual courtesies apply; permission from the landowner should be sought before approaching. The earthwork is not signposted or formally presented, and the visible remains are subtle enough that knowing roughly where to look, ideally with the satellite image to hand for reference, makes the difference between finding it and walking past it entirely. The low-angled light of morning or late afternoon in autumn or winter tends to throw slight ground features like this into sharper relief, making scarps and banks easier to read in the grass.