The ditch, roughly 1.2 metres wide and up to 0.6 metres deep, ran for at least 17 metres on a northeast-to-southwest alignment before turning sharply to the southeast at its southwestern end. It extended further to the northeast as well, where it was eventually cut through by the later field bank that now forms the townland boundary with Gunnocks. That later boundary, in other words, physically erased part of the earlier one, leaving only a truncated section in the ground and a set of ceramic fragments to tell the story.

The finds recovered from the uppermost fill of the ditch are what give the feature its character. Eight sherds of Dublin-type pottery, a distinctive glazed ware produced in and around Dublin during the high and later medieval period, dated the ditch to somewhere between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. A horseshoe of medieval type came from the same deposit. The ditch itself was filled with three layers of silty clay, ranging in colour from grey to yellow, with iron-panning at the base, a result of waterlogged conditions that caused dissolved iron compounds to precipitate out over time. The site, designated Site 19 during a broader programme of monitoring and excavation covering around 92 hectares across Clonee, Portan, and Gunnocks, was investigated by D. Bayley as part of work that ran intermittently from late 2015 through to October 2018 and identified 37 locations of potential archaeological significance across that wider area.