In Dunbell Big, County Kilkenny, a site once substantial enough to be carefully drawn and measured, roughly 54 metres north to south and 42 metres east to west, had been erased from the revised maps produced between 1899 and 1902, along with the belt of trees that had been planted to screen it from the River Nore and a nearby stream. Whether the enclosure was levelled, overgrown beyond recognition, or simply omitted by surveyors working to different priorities is not recorded.

The 1839 first-edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map shows the site positioned on ground overlooking the Nore as it flows northwest to southeast, with the river lying roughly 90 metres to the west and a tributary stream cutting northeast to southwest about 30 metres to the south. The deliberate planting of trees between the enclosure and both waterways suggests the site was being actively managed at the time of the first survey, which makes its subsequent disappearance from the revised edition all the more puzzling. Enclosures of this oval form are generally associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, often the remains of a ringfort or its precursor, earthwork boundaries that once defined a farmstead or small defended homestead. That a feature of this scale could simply drop out of the record within a few decades points to how rapidly the rural landscape was being reorganised and reworked during the nineteenth century.

Satellite imagery captured in 2021 shows scrubby overgrowth at the location of the enclosure, and a working quarry pressing in immediately to the southeast. The monument sits in an increasingly pressured pocket of land, caught between encroaching extraction and the natural screen of vegetation that has reclaimed what the planted trees once managed.