What was once a clearly defined enclosure, large enough to measure roughly 80 metres by 75 metres when it was recorded on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1932, has since been levelled to the point where only a faint platform remains, rising a mere half a metre above the waterlogged ground around it. A field wall cuts across it at both the northern and southern ends, compounding the damage. You would walk over it without knowing.

What this platform once represented is itself an open question. The two most likely candidates are a ringfort or a moated site, and the uncertainty between them is genuinely interesting. Ringforts, the most common archaeological monument type in Ireland, are typically circular enclosures associated with early medieval farming settlements, defined by earthen banks or stone walls. Moated sites, by contrast, are generally medieval in date, roughly thirteenth to fourteenth century, and consist of a raised rectangular platform surrounded by a water-filled ditch, often associated with Anglo-Norman settlement. The enclosure at Fairhill sits near the southern foot of a low hill with a small stream running immediately to its south, a detail that fits either interpretation but is particularly suggestive of the latter: moated sites frequently exploited natural watercourses to help flood their surrounding ditches. The vaguely subrectangular shape noted on the 1932 map, combined with that streamside position, nudges the balance slightly toward the moated site reading, though no excavation appears to have settled the matter.