When the Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1840, the surveyors recorded a neat circular enclosure, the kind of roughly ring-shaped earthwork that appears across Ireland in its thousands, most of them the remains of early medieval farmsteads known as raths or ringforts. What exists on the ground today, however, tells a different story. The circular form has largely collapsed into a linear ridge running roughly north to south, around 26 metres long and 30.5 metres wide, with an internal height of 0.7 metres and an external height of nearly 3 metres. A short return section, about 12 metres long, angles off to the north-east at the northern end. The gap between what the map shows and what the land now holds is the puzzle.

The 1840 depiction comes from the first large-scale Ordnance Survey of Ireland, a mapping project of considerable ambition that recorded earthworks, field boundaries, and ancient monuments across the country at six inches to the mile. At that time, the enclosure was shown with a hachured bank sweeping from south-south-east to west-north-west, suggesting the arc of a once-complete or near-complete circular form. Over the intervening decades, either agricultural pressure, natural erosion, or the presence of rock outcroppings in the vicinity, which are noted as visible near the site, has reshaped what remains above ground into something that now reads more as a field boundary than as the enclosure it once was. Denis Power compiled the site record, which was uploaded in October 2013.

The enclosure sits in gently undulating pasture, so the approach on foot is straightforward enough, though as with most earthworks in active farmland, access depends on the goodwill of the landowner. The most instructive way to visit is with a copy of the 1840 OS map to hand, either printed or via one of the online historical map viewers that overlay old surveys onto satellite imagery. Standing at the northern end of the surviving ridge, where the return section angles away to the east-north-east, it becomes easier to mentally reconstruct the original circular plan. The rock outcroppings nearby are worth noting, as they may partly explain why the earthwork has survived here at all, even in its diminished form, where softer ground around it has long since been levelled.