That classification, with its suggestion of ancient settlement or ritual use, turns out to be somewhat misleading. Current thinking holds that what the cartographers captured was not a prehistoric ringfort or ceremonial boundary at all, but a marl pit, now filled in and grassed over into ordinary pasture.

Marl pits were a common feature of Irish farmland from the seventeenth century onwards. Marl, a calcium-rich clay or limestone deposit found beneath the topsoil, was dug out and spread across acidic fields to improve fertility, functioning much as lime does. The pits left behind were often circular and could reach considerable diameters, making them easy to mistake, from a distance or on a map, for the earthwork enclosures associated with early medieval settlement. The Raherd example sits quietly in this ambiguous space between agricultural history and archaeological record, a piece of land improvement that briefly wore the costume of antiquity.