The enclosure, approximately forty metres north to south and thirty-eight metres east to west, resists close inspection almost as a matter of principle. Its outline shows up, dimly, in aerial and satellite photography taken between 2004 and 2018, the perimeter readable as a smudge of dense vegetation rather than as anything so legible as a bank or ditch.

The site appeared on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1842, which places it firmly in the documentary record even if its origins remain unclear. It was still marked on the Cassini edition of 1920, suggesting it had not been entirely absorbed into agricultural land during the intervening decades of field improvement. Enclosures of this general type, broadly subcircular and of comparable dimensions, are often associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, though without excavation or a clear surface survey it is impossible to say more than that. What gives Lackareagh its quietly odd character is the company it keeps: a ringfort sits roughly 230 metres to the south-east, and a second enclosure lies about the same distance to the south. Three related earthworks within a few hundred metres of one another on the same ridge hints at a landscape that was once more intensively organised than the current scrub and improved pasture would suggest.

Field clearance material deposited over the site has only added to its obscurity, layering agricultural tidying-up over whatever original form the perimeter once held. The place is not so much lost as persistently illegible, present on maps for nearly two centuries and yet never quite available to anyone who has gone to look at it directly.