The structure, roughly eighteen metres in diameter and defined by a loosely constructed stone wall about 1.3 metres wide, had been entered into the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and again into the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, carrying the quiet authority that official listing tends to confer.

The reclassification matters because Ireland's landscape is genuinely scattered with ancient enclosures, many of them circular, many of them built from loosely arranged stone, and distinguishing a prehistoric or early medieval example from a later field boundary or animal pen can require close, careful examination on the ground. The gorge setting here, deepening further to the east, is the kind of terrain where such structures appear in various forms and for various purposes across many centuries. In this case, though, the construction technique pointed away from antiquity. The enclosure remains in place, a real physical thing in the landscape, but its biography turned out to be considerably shorter than the official record had implied.