On the ground, there was nothing to suggest otherwise. It was only when topsoil was stripped away that the true shape of the place revealed itself: a roughly circular enclosure about 56 metres across, its perimeter marked by a ring of fragmented sandstone stones, the remnants of what had once been a substantial bank. Beneath and around it lay a surrounding ditch, in places over five metres wide and more than two metres deep, that had been quietly invisible to every generation who had farmed the land above it.

The excavation, described by Michael Connolly in his 2008 doctoral thesis on the prehistoric settlement of the Lee Valley near Tralee, produced a picture that was as puzzling as it was compelling. The ditch had been filled in twice. The upper layers were modern, the accumulated result of ordinary agricultural activity. But below that modern material, the fill appeared to be deliberate, possibly carried out in antiquity by people who chose to close the monument rather than simply abandon it. Basal silt at the very bottom of the ditch suggested it had stood open for a considerable period before that primary backfilling began. More striking still was what the interior did not contain: no hearths, no post-holes, no recognisable traces of everyday occupation. The date of the monument remains unknown. Connolly noted that the absence of domestic material might point toward a ritual function, placing this enclosure, tentatively, in a category of prehistoric monuments built not for shelter or settlement but for purposes that are now largely beyond recovery.