One is a rath, the circular earthen enclosure that was the standard farmstead form of early medieval Ireland, defined by a raised bank and sometimes a ditch. The other is a smaller oval enclosure, roughly fifteen metres east to west and ten metres north to south, that sat just off-centre inside the rath. Both were recorded, both were mapped, and then both were gone.

The 1894 Ordnance Survey six-inch map captured the oval enclosure clearly enough for later researchers to note its dimensions and position relative to the rath. What the map could not protect was the ground itself. During land reclamation works in the mid-1970s, the rath was levelled, and with it went any surface trace of the interior enclosure. Small enclosures nested within raths are not unheard of, and their purpose is debated; some may have been animal pens, others more structured spaces within a domestic compound. Whatever this one was for, the record of it now survives only on paper and in cartographic form, the landscape having been smoothed flat by machinery that almost certainly had no idea what it was removing.