That quiet persistence of local memory, attaching an old word to a place that official cartography never bothered to record, is the first thing that makes it worth a second look.

The enclosure measures approximately twelve metres northeast to southwest and eighteen metres northwest to southeast. Modern field boundary banks now define most of its outline, but those banks appear in part to be tracing an older enclosure beneath them, the newer work following the ghost of something earlier. Along the curving arc from east-northeast to west, the boundary bank is around one and a half metres wide at the top and rises to an internal height of one and a half metres, with a drain running immediately outside it. The straighter sides to the north and west are formed by later, more utilitarian field divisions. The original entrance, if there was a formal one, has not survived in any recognisable form. An enclosure of this kind, a defined and bounded area set slightly apart from the surrounding land, would in Irish archaeology broadly suggest a settlement site or a farmstead enclosure of early medieval date, though without excavation nothing more specific can be said about Gortarowey. What can be said is that the slight south-facing slope and the surrounding wet pasture together give some sense of why someone once chose, and then marked out, this particular patch of ground.