No ordnance survey map, across any of the editions produced since the nineteenth century, has ever marked it. What brought it to official attention at all was not fieldwork or local tradition, but a single aerial photograph.

In 1995 the site was added to the Record of Monuments and Places as a possible enclosure, the identification resting entirely on that aerial image. Enclosures of this kind, broadly speaking, are defined areas enclosed by a bank, ditch, or both, and they appear throughout Ireland in a wide range of forms and periods. The feature at Carrownacreevy measures approximately 26 metres on its north-to-south axis and around 17 metres across, giving it a gently oval outline. A modern field boundary now bisects it almost centrally on a north-to-south line, cutting through whatever coherence the original form once had. The improved, undulating pasture that surrounds it shows little sign of the underlying archaeology at ground level, which is precisely why the aerial photograph was needed in the first place.