For years it appeared in official records as a possible cashel, the term for a stone-walled ringfort of early medieval origin, the kind of structure that dots the Irish countryside in considerable numbers and carries real archaeological weight. The classification stuck, repeated in successive surveys, until someone actually went and looked.

The enclosure had been marked on the 1916 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, and the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1901, appears to have noted something in the vicinity. That combination of cartographic and historical reference was enough to keep the site on the archaeological radar. When an inspection was finally carried out in 1997, the structure turned out to be a drystone-walled enclosure of modern post and panel construction, roughly nineteen metres across in both directions, with walls between 0.6 and 0.8 metres wide and reaching no more than 1.4 metres in height at their highest point. It is, in other words, a field enclosure, the kind of everyday agricultural boundary that farmers have been building and rebuilding across Ireland for generations, with no medieval origin to speak of.