It sat in reclaimed pasture, unremarkable to a passing eye, yet distinct enough on the ground that the Ordnance Survey recorded it on their first edition six-inch maps, showing a defined perimeter with a dwelling inside. By 1916, the same feature appeared on revised mapping as a subcircular field, roughly fifty metres east to west and forty-five metres north to south, its original angles softened or simply redrawn.

Enclosures of this kind appear throughout Ireland in considerable variety, ranging from early medieval ringforts to post-medieval farmstead boundaries, and without closer examination it is rarely possible to say which tradition a particular example belongs to. That ambiguity became permanent here. When the site was inspected in 1997, the enclosure and several neighbouring fields to the west and northwest had been completely levelled. The ground had been cleared so thoroughly that no physical evidence remained from which a date of construction could be drawn. What had once been recorded and mapped, first in the nineteenth century and again in 1916, existed by the late twentieth century only in those older documents.