On the Ordnance Survey's 25-inch map of 1893, it appears as a pond. By the time the 6-inch map was revised in 1916, the same feature had been redrawn as a solid-lined circular area, suggesting something altogether more solid than standing water. It took a physical inspection to settle the matter.

When the site was examined in 1998, what emerged was a drystone-walled enclosure, most likely a sheepfold. Drystone construction, which uses carefully fitted stones without mortar, was the standard method for field boundaries and small enclosures across the west of Ireland, particularly in areas where limestone is abundant underfoot. The Burren region of Clare, where Parknabinnia sits, is precisely that kind of landscape. Whether the cartographers of 1893 genuinely mistook the feature for a pond, or whether the enclosure was waterlogged or partially collapsed at the time of their survey, the maps alone cannot say. What the sequence of records does show is how the same unremarkable circle on paper can accumulate entirely different meanings across a century of documentation.