When surveyors came to inspect it in 1998, they found an oval of dry-stone walling, roughly fourteen metres across, with a small gap facing north-north-east and a smaller conjoined enclosure, about seven metres in diameter, attached at the northern side. The walling itself was judged to be of apparently modern construction, meaning the site had spent years listed on national records as a historic enclosure before closer examination introduced a degree of doubt about its antiquity.

The site had been included as an enclosure in both the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. These records exist to flag features in the landscape that may be of archaeological significance, and oval enclosures of dry-stone construction do appear throughout the Irish countryside as genuine early medieval or prehistoric field boundaries and settlement remains. The difficulty at Berneens is that the fabric of the walls suggests a later hand. What survives sits in a slight natural hollow on elevated ground, sheltered from the immediate surroundings in the way that genuinely old enclosures sometimes are, which may explain why it attracted attention in the first place.