Marked on the 1916 Ordnance Survey six-inch map with a confident solid line, it carries the visual authority of a feature worth recording. When someone finally went to look properly in 1999, what they found was a heavily overgrown drystone wall curving from east through south to west, the northern arc already gone, and the whole thing judged to be modern in origin rather than ancient.

The site sits on level ground near the south-western base of a ridge in County Clare, a setting that might, in other circumstances, suit an early medieval enclosure or a ringfort. Ringforts, which were typically circular earthen or stone enclosures used as farmsteads from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, are common across Clare, and the shape alone can raise expectations. This one was listed as an enclosure in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and again in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, which gave it an official presence on the heritage map of Ireland before anyone had confirmed what it actually was. The 1999 inspection quietly revised that picture. Drystone construction, in which stones are laid without mortar, is a technique used across many centuries in the west of Ireland, so the wall itself offers little help in dating. What the inspection could say was that nothing about the surviving remains suggested antiquity.