What makes it particularly curious is the way the historical record captures its gradual transformation: where the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 recorded a clearly circular earthwork enclosed by a bank, the same site appeared on the 1897 twenty-five-inch edition as something rather different, a horseshoe shape, open at the south-east, measuring roughly fourteen metres north to south and nine metres east to west. Whether the enclosure physically changed in that half-century, or whether the later surveyors simply recorded it more precisely, is not easy to say.

Enclosures of this kind are a common enough feature of the Irish landscape, low earthen banks thrown up around a defined area, sometimes associated with early medieval settlement, sometimes with agricultural use, and often genuinely difficult to date without excavation. The 1840 map shows the site intersected by a laneway running north-east to south-west, entering from the south-east to south, which suggests the enclosure was still being used, or at least acknowledged, as part of the working landscape at that point. By the time the Archaeological Survey of Ireland visited in 1997, the site had become inaccessible entirely, the plantation and scrub vegetation having closed in around it. Orthophotographs taken between 2005 and 2012 confirm it was still smothered in overgrowth. The record was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the national database in April 2021.

Access remains the central difficulty here. The site lies within a conifer plantation, 47 metres north of the townland boundary with Glendarragh, and a further 385 metres from a related enclosure to the south-east. Dense conifer planting tends to suppress undergrowth at ground level but can make navigation through a plantation genuinely disorienting, and the scrub vegetation recorded around the enclosure itself adds another layer of difficulty. Anyone hoping to locate the earthwork would do well to consult the OSi historical map layers online beforehand, comparing the 1840 and 1897 editions to get a sense of the bank's rough position relative to the old laneway. The enclosure is unlikely to be visible as a clear feature from any distance; what you are looking for is a low rise in the ground, a curving bank, perhaps only a subtle change in the way the land sits.