That shifting appearance is not simply a matter of cartographic convention; it reflects how difficult these sites can be to read, and how much depends on who is looking and how.

When the Ordnance Survey mapped this area in 1842, the enclosure was recorded as a roughly rectangular feature, approximately 70 metres north to south and 55 metres east to west, with the southern side bowing outward in a gentle curve. By the time the survey returned in 1935, the same feature had been rendered as a circular raised area with a diameter of around 60 metres. On the ground today, the reality is somewhere between the two: a roughly circular area of about 62 metres across, defined by a slight scarp, a low internal rise, and a shallow external depression that follows the outer edge. The interior tilts gently downward toward the north. What ties these different readings together is an aerial photograph in which a cropmark, the differential growth of grass or crops over a buried bank and its accompanying fosse, or external ditch, traces the true outline of the enclosure from above with a clarity that ground-level inspection cannot easily provide. Enclosures of this general type are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape, associated broadly with early medieval settlement, though the absence of excavation here means that any more specific interpretation remains open.