For the best part of a century it sat on official records as an archaeological monument, listed under the category of enclosure and carrying the faint suggestion of antiquity that such a designation implies. It took a site inspection in 1997 to confirm what a farmer could probably have told anyone who asked: it is a modest subrectangular field, roughly 22 metres east to west and 18 metres north to south, enclosed by a single drystone wall averaging about 1.4 metres in height and less than a metre wide, with a small livestock pen tucked into the western corner. The construction was judged to be apparently modern. The surrounding ground, rocky outcrop and rough grazing, gives some sense of why someone would bother enclosing any usable patch at all.

The site had attracted attention earlier, in a manner of speaking. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1901, mentioned it as a fort, though he noted he had not actually managed to visit. Westropp was a prolific recorder of ringforts, cashels, and earthworks across Clare and the west of Ireland, and his notes carried considerable weight with later compilers. That passing reference was apparently enough to keep the site tethered to the archaeological record through successive surveys in 1992 and 1996. A drystone enclosure of genuinely early medieval date, known as a cashel, would typically show features such as great wall thickness, a formal entrance, and sometimes interior features like souterrains or building platforms. This one has a livestock pen. The gap between what Westropp imagined and what was eventually found is a small lesson in how sites accumulate significance through repetition rather than evidence.