It is the kind of site that rewards patience with maps more than it rewards walking: the vegetation has done its work thoroughly, and what was once a legible form in the landscape is now largely a matter of inference.

The enclosure was already recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, and it appears again on the revision carried out between 1899 and 1902, both times as a clearly circular feature. Enclosures of this type, sometimes called ringforts, were typically built during the early medieval period in Ireland as defended farmsteads, the earthen banks and ditches marking off a family's living and working space from the surrounding land. At the time of the earlier mapping, the ground around it was noted as gorse country, those dense, spiny thickets known variously as furze or whins, which tells something about how marginal or uncultivated the immediate area was even then. Running roughly 100 metres to the south is a long, narrow pond, approximately 155 metres in length and no more than 12 metres wide at its broadest point. What relationship, if any, it had to the enclosure's original function is not recorded. More striking still is the density of archaeological activity in this small corner of Kilkenny: a second enclosure sits immediately to the east, and a third lies about 130 metres to the south-south-west, suggesting that whatever drew people to settle here in the early medieval period, the appeal was sustained and repeated across a tight cluster of sites.