When someone finally went to look closely in 1998, the picture turned out to be considerably less clear.

What the inspection found was a subcircular enclosure roughly 25 metres in diameter, but the wall defining it was loosely built, unfaced, and showed none of the stone spread you would expect from a genuinely ancient structure settling over centuries. The conclusion was that the boundary wall, at least in its present form, is modern. Within the northern portion of the interior, however, there are traces of a low and irregular stone enclosure that may represent something older beneath or alongside the later construction, and a rectangular walled area butts up against the exterior on the eastern side. The site may be one of the "seven or eight defaced forts" that the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp noted at a place called Shanbally in Ballyryan in 1905, which would suggest that whatever once stood here had already been substantially altered or robbed of its stonework well before the twentieth century. Whether the original feature was a cashel proper or something else entirely is now difficult to determine.

The site sits in an exposed, low-lying stretch of ground, the kind of landscape where field boundaries tend to accumulate layers of reuse and amendment over time, making it genuinely hard to separate ancient fabric from later repair or outright replacement. What remains is less a monument in any conventional sense and more a puzzle about how historical categories get applied and then quietly complicated when the ground is actually examined.