In September 1983, surveyors recorded a roughly D-shaped enclosure measuring approximately 85 metres north to south and 80 metres east to west, its boundary defined by a drystone wall nearly three metres wide and up to 1.7 metres high. Drystone construction, built without mortar, is among the oldest and most durable forms of walling in Ireland, and this example was described as well-preserved. Less than eight years later, in April or May of 1991, land clearance operations levelled it almost completely.

The enclosure had attracted scholarly attention long before that. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, who documented hundreds of monuments across Connacht and Munster in the early twentieth century, included a sketch plan of the site in 1919. He noted a gap at the north-north-east, and a slight trace of what appeared to be a mortar-built gateway at roughly the same point, suggesting a more elaborate entrance than the plain drystone wall might imply. When surveyors returned in 1983, they could find no definite surface trace of either feature. Inside the enclosure, a castle once stood, and a ringfort, the circular enclosed settlement that is one of the most common early medieval monument types in Ireland, lay just 25 metres to the north-west. The clustering of these features points to a landscape that was in continuous, layered use across many centuries. The irony is that a preservation order was made under the National Monuments Acts in 1991, the same year the monument was destroyed.