On a gentle rise in the landscape, the 1932 Ordnance Survey map recorded a roughly circular enclosure some 35 metres across. When an inspector visited in 1967, what they found prompted a notably candid reaction: the site was logged as a ringfort with a question mark, and described in the Office of Public Works topographical files as a "really odd, oval low platform enclosure." That phrase, written into an official record and left to stand on its own, tells you something about how thoroughly this place resisted easy classification.

A ringfort, to give the term its context, is a type of enclosed farmstead common throughout early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches surrounding a circular area of habitation. They are among the most numerous monument types in the Irish countryside. The Ticooly enclosure, however, seems to have given the inspector pause. The 1967 description records its dimensions as approximately 49 paces north to south by 38 paces east to west, making it notably oval rather than circular, and notes that it was bounded by a deep fosse with steep sides, a fosse being a defensive or boundary ditch cut into the ground. Whether that combination of form and feature pointed toward a ringfort, a stock enclosure, or something else entirely was apparently not resolved. The question mark in the classification was left in place.

What makes the site particularly elusive now is that no visible surface trace survives. Whatever earthworks once defined that platform and its steep-sided ditch have since been levelled, ploughed out, or otherwise erased from the ground. The 1932 map and the 1967 fieldnotes are, in effect, all that remains of it. The rise in Ticooly still exists, presumably, but the enclosure that once sat on it has retreated entirely into the paper record, odd and unresolved as it always was.