That something, it turns out, appears to be the eastern edge of a circular enclosure roughly 40 metres in diameter, the kind of earthwork that in Ireland most often dates to the early medieval period and was used as a farmstead or small defended settlement. The boundary between Ballymack (Desart) and Newtown (Baker) seems to have been drawn, at some point in the past, to respect and possibly incorporate the enclosure's rim, which is the sort of detail that suggests the feature was visible and recognised as meaningful when the boundary was first established.

The enclosure came to light not through fieldwork on the ground but through a LiDAR survey, a remote-sensing technique that uses laser pulses to map surface topography in fine detail, carried out along the N76 road by Transport Infrastructure Ireland and examined by Bernice Kelly. The western portion of the enclosure has been levelled, and the site is faint enough that it escaped notice on earlier surveys, but both the LiDAR data and satellite imagery show the outline clearly enough to confirm its roughly circular shape. What makes the site's history stranger still is that the first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in the nineteenth century, shows a house sitting inside the enclosure in its north-eastern quadrant, with a short avenue running south-westward for about 30 metres before meeting a field boundary. By the time the OS revised that map, the house and its avenue had vanished from the record entirely. A second enclosure lies approximately 300 metres to the south-south-west, suggesting this small area of Kilkenny countryside was once more densely settled or organised than its present appearance would suggest.