Yet the dimensions tell a different story. The enclosure measures roughly 140 metres by 100 metres, large enough to contain a small field, and aerial photographs reveal its shape clearly even when the ground itself offers little. That disproportionate scale, combined with an almost complete absence of the domestic debris that typically accumulates wherever people lived and ate, is what makes this place quietly puzzling.

Excavation here, carried out by Rose Cleary under licence No. 96E0249 and funded by the Royal Irish Academy, uncovered at least four distinct levels of activity, suggesting the site was used, modified, and used again across a considerable span of time. Beneath re-deposited boulder clay, which may represent the remains of a bank that was deliberately levelled while the site was still in operation, lay a stony band interpreted as a trackway. Post-holes cut into this trackway hint at some kind of fencing or structure running above it. More striking still are the linear slot-trenches found within the enclosure: two parallel lines of substantial post-holes, set 19.6 metres apart, with the individual holes spaced roughly 1.4 metres from one another. These are tentatively identified as large palisades, the kind of upright timber walls that would have enclosed a significant interior space. Artefacts recovered were sparse: some flint debitage, indicating that flint-working took place on site, a scraper, and just three small fragments of pottery. The near-total absence of ceramics is striking in comparison with other prehistoric sites excavated nearby at Lough Gur, one of the most intensively studied prehistoric landscapes in Ireland, and the excavators suggested the site may have served a ritual rather than domestic purpose.

The enclosure sits on the western edge of Red Bog, the silted remnant of a former lake, in County Limerick. The site is not formally managed for visitors, and what is visible at ground level is subtle: the low bank on the east side is the most legible surviving feature. Those familiar with reading earthworks will get the most from a visit, particularly in low winter light when slight changes in ground level show up more clearly. The surrounding landscape, shaped by the slow disappearance of the lake it once overlooked, gives some sense of why a large, formally bounded space might have been created here in the first place.