A circular enclosure, somewhere between 25 and 30 metres in diameter, appears clearly on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, drawn in the manner of a rath, the type of roughly circular earthen enclosure built across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically serving as a defended farmstead. A smaller companion enclosure sat immediately to its south-east. By the time later map editions were produced, both had vanished from the cartographic record entirely. At ground level today, nothing remains.

What the maps could not prevent, quarrying accomplished. The western slope of the ridge has been substantially cut away, and it is probable that at least the western half of the main enclosure was destroyed in the process. The 1837 survey, part of the first large-scale systematic mapping of Ireland, caught the site at what may have been one of its final moments of visibility. The enclosure at Quignalecka sits in a category that archaeology occasionally has to acknowledge: places that are known to have existed, whose outline was recorded just in time, and whose physical reality has since been erased almost entirely by industrial activity. The ridge location, elevated above the river, would have been a practical choice for an early settlement, offering both prospect and some natural defence, though without surviving earthworks any interpretation remains cautious.