It does not look like much at first glance, but it has been sitting in exactly the same configuration for at least as long as anyone has been making detailed maps of this part of Ireland, and probably a great deal longer. On the western side, a subtle break of slope hints at something more deliberate beneath the grass, the kind of gentle platform or bank that tends to signal an enclosure of considerable age.

The structure appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1846 and 1895, its curving field boundary unchanged between the two surveys, which were themselves separated by nearly half a century. An aerial photograph taken in 1977 confirmed that nothing had shifted in the intervening decades either. Enclosures of this kind, roughly circular or subcircular earthworks defined by a bank and sometimes an outer ditch or drain, are a familiar feature of the Irish landscape and often date to the early medieval period, though many have earlier origins. Here, a stream runs along a deep drain on the outside of the field boundary, which may have served a drainage function or may reflect the original water management of the enclosure itself. A gateway survives at the eastern side, and a pile of earth and stones in the southern sector is the kind of remnant that tends to accumulate where a bank has been disturbed or partly robbed for building material over the centuries.