The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, among the most reliable records of nineteenth-century Irish landscape detail, marked it as a tree-filled oval feature on ground that was once part of Cregaclare Demesne. Today the trees have been felled, the interior disturbed by digging, and the low bank that defines it, roughly one and a half metres wide and less than a metre in height on either face, gives little away about its origins or purpose.

The ambiguity at the heart of this site is genuinely unresolved. In 1952, a researcher named McCaffrey classified it as a much-denuded earthen fort, an oval enclosure measuring approximately 41 metres north to south and 32 metres east to west. Earthen forts, known more commonly as raths or ring-forts, are among the most numerous archaeological monuments in Ireland, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as enclosed farmsteads. The dimensions here would be consistent with that type. However, the possibility remains that the feature is not prehistoric or early medieval at all, but rather a designed element of the demesne landscape, the kind of ornamental or functional enclosure that estate owners commonly added to their grounds during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Without excavation, the two interpretations sit uneasily alongside each other, and the disturbance to the interior has not helped matters.