It was found not by archaeologists prospecting with maps, but by accident: a flint scraper of Bronze Age type turned up during peat cutting in 1961, and when investigators examined the surrounding bog, they found an entire enclosed farming landscape preserved beneath it. The enclosure does not appear on any Ordnance Survey maps from 1837 to 1922, for the simple reason that the bog had swallowed it long before anyone thought to draw a map of the area.

The enclosure takes a roughly kidney shape, measuring approximately 150 metres east to west and 100 metres north to south, and is defined by a drystone wall, a construction technique using stones stacked without mortar, built here to a base width of nearly two metres and surviving to a height of around 0.9 metres. Charcoal retrieved from beneath the wall returned a radiocarbon date centring on 1295 BC, placing the original construction firmly in the Bronze Age. Survey and excavation work carried out through the 1970s and 1980s, led in part by Michael Herity, uncovered cultivation ridges across the interior and beyond the wall to the north and south, along with a hut site within the enclosure itself. Pollen analysis, published by O'Connell in 1990, added a longer view: the cores drawn from inside the enclosure and from a low-lying area downslope to the south showed evidence of cereal growing and confirmed that clearance and farming here did not happen once and stop. Instead, there were successive phases of agricultural activity stretching from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age, across several centuries, before the land was gradually overwhelmed by the encroaching blanket bog that ultimately preserved it.