For years, that is more or less what it was assumed to be. It appeared in official records as an archaeological enclosure, the kind of classification that tends to confer a quiet authority, suggesting human activity reaching back centuries or further.

The reality turned out to be rather more mundane, and in its own way more interesting. When surveyors from University College Cork visited the site as part of the Iveragh Survey, they noted it as a possible fionnán enclosure. Fionnán is a coarse grass, Molinia caerulea, common on wet upland ground in Ireland, and enclosures associated with it are typically modern agricultural features rather than ancient monuments. A follow-up field inspection in April 2003 confirmed the suspicion: the ground is boggy, and crucially, the stones forming the enclosing element are only embedded in the bog surface rather than set into the earth beneath it. That shallow placement points firmly to recent construction. The site was subsequently removed from the category of protected monument, having been listed as an enclosure in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1990 and again in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1997.

What the Greenane site illustrates is the ordinary difficulty of reading a landscape. Stones arranged in a rough circuit on open ground carry an instinctive suggestion of antiquity, and in Kerry, where ancient enclosures, cashels, and ringforts genuinely do survive in considerable numbers, that instinct is understandable. But bogland preserves and obscures in unpredictable ways, and a feature that looks old from a distance can reveal its modernity the moment someone crouches down to examine how the stones actually sit in the ground.