There is a certain quiet irony in that: a site associated in all likelihood with the ancient rituals of the dead, rediscovered only because the living had chosen the same general ground for the same general purpose.

The enclosure came to light during archaeological test-trenching carried out in April 2014, under licence 14E0106. What the excavators found was a circular ditched enclosure roughly 43 to 46 metres in diameter, its surrounding ditch between 2.9 and 3.4 metres wide and just under a metre deep. Inside the ditch, the ground held post-holes, pits, and a linear feature, the traces of structures and activities that have not yet been fully interpreted. Enclosures of this kind, defined by a ditch rather than a raised bank, appear throughout the Irish landscape in various forms and periods; some were domestic, some ceremonial, and some connected with burial or ritual use. The internal features here, combined with the presence of a ring-ditch approximately 450 metres to the south-south-east, hint at a landscape that carried significance across a long stretch of prehistory. Ring-ditches are typically the eroded remnants of burial mounds, and their proximity to enclosed sites like this one is a pattern seen elsewhere in Ireland. The fields immediately to the south add further texture, containing a field system and several additional enclosures and earthworks, suggesting this west-facing slope above the lough was once a much more organised and inhabited place than its present pastoral quietness would suggest.