A circular embanked enclosure, somewhere between twenty and twenty-five metres in diameter, was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837, drawn with enough confidence to suggest it was then still a legible feature on the landscape. By later map editions, it had already disappeared from the record. Enclosures of this type, roughly circular earthworks defined by a raised bank, are found widely across Ireland and are generally associated with early medieval settlement or land division, though their functions and dates vary considerably from site to site.

When the hillock was inspected in 1997, there was nothing to see at ground level. Whatever had once given the enclosure its shape, whether a substantial earthen bank or something slighter, had by then been reduced below the threshold of visibility. The story might have ended there, as a quiet erasure, but in 2006 the situation worsened. During unauthorised off-road works connected with construction of the N5 Charlestown Bypass, topsoil was scraped from the top of the hill. The damage was unplanned and unsanctioned, and it is considered likely to have destroyed or severely compromised whatever sub-surface archaeology remained. What the 1837 surveyors recorded, and what had survived invisibly underground for perhaps a century and a half after that, may now be gone entirely.