A substantial drystone enclosure once curved across the ground here in an arc of roughly thirty metres, running from north to south-southeast. Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and relies entirely on the careful stacking of stone, was employed for everything from field boundaries to ancient ring forts across the west of Ireland, making it difficult at a glance to assign age or purpose to any given structure. This one posed a particular puzzle.

By the time anyone looked at it closely, in 1969, it was already ambiguous. Inspectors noted that the wall had no proper inner or outer facing, meaning the stones had not been laid with the deliberate, finished surfaces you would expect of a structure built to last or to impress. That observation nudged it away from the category of ancient enclosure and towards something more utilitarian: a sheepfold, perhaps, thrown up by a farmer at some unrecorded point to manage livestock on rough ground. It had been recorded on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1933, marked only as a curved line of hachures, the cartographic shorthand for an earthen or stone bank. That map notation was, it turns out, among the last reliable evidence that the structure existed at all. When the site was revisited in 1992, the land had been extensively cleared, and no visible trace of the enclosure remained on the surface.