Surveyors who visited could not gain access to examine it directly, so what we know of it comes mainly from how it was recorded at two different points in the nineteenth century, and the two pictures do not fully agree.

The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1846 shows it as a straightforward rectangle, roughly sixty metres along its northeast to southwest axis and about thirty metres across. By the time the same area was mapped again in 1894, something had changed, or perhaps had simply been observed more carefully: the northeastern end appears wider, with sides that curve slightly outward rather than meeting at clean right angles. In the 1840s, the Ordnance Survey Name Books, which were field notebooks used by surveyors to record local placenames and topographical features, referred to it as "Ballybrack fort", placing it in the southern part of the townland of Kilnanare. The word "fort" in this context is a common piece of Irish rural shorthand, often applied to enclosures of medieval or earlier date, whether they were defensive in function or simply the remains of a farmstead boundary. Whether this one was ever a working settlement, a cattle enclosure, or something else remains an open question. It sits in the landscape, quietly unexamined, its outline shifting depending on who drew the map and when.