Mapped in 1839 as a roughly circular enclosure about 39 metres across, it had the classic appearance of a ringfort, the kind of raised or embanked farmstead built across Ireland during the early medieval period. By the time surveyors returned for the revised Ordnance Survey edition of 1900, something had already changed: only the curving western side remained, with the interior showing signs of depression and exposed rock. When the site was physically inspected in 1987, the explanation became clear. What had once looked like an ancient enclosure was, by that point, a quarry.

The original 1839 six-inch Ordnance Survey map, produced during the first systematic mapping of Ireland, recorded the site using hachures, short lines used to indicate slopes and earthworks, which gave it the unmistakable profile of a circular earthen enclosure. The retention of the western curve even into the quarrying phase suggests that at least part of the original structure survived long enough to shape how the extraction was carried out, or perhaps the quarry simply followed the natural contour of what was already there. Whether the ringfort was demolished to access stone beneath it, or whether the stone itself had always been the more prominent feature, is something the surviving evidence cannot settle. By 2019, satellite imagery indicated that even the quarry had been infilled, leaving a grassed-over field with no visible surface trace of either the enclosure or the excavation that succeeded it.