The site at Firville is a quiet example of how landscape improvement projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries quietly erased earlier archaeology, replacing earthworks with water features and leaving only ambiguous traces behind.

When researcher Bowman noted the site in 1934, it was already described as a levelled fort on land belonging to a J. Aherne, within the Firville demesne. A demesne is the private land surrounding a country house, typically managed as a designed landscape, and it is precisely that kind of management that accounts for what happened here. The fort was gone, and in its place, roughly 100 metres to the west of the house, an artificial lake had been constructed. Stone blocks line the inner face of the southern side of the lake, and a section of earthen bank survives to the south. Whether that bank is a remnant of the original enclosure, the kind of roughly circular earthwork that once served as an enclosed farmstead or place of local authority in early medieval Ireland, or simply spoil heaped up during the digging of the pond, is not clear. The landscaping around the lake has since been left to its own devices, and the pond is now partially overgrown.