They are easy to overlook, the kind of features that read as gentle undulations in the grass rather than deliberate human construction, yet they carry the faint outline of domestic life from some unspecified point in the past. What makes them quietly compelling is precisely that uncertainty: the archaeology records them as possible house sites with associated field systems, but no surviving evidence has pinned them to a century, a culture, or a name.

The two sites sit in the ground in noticeably different ways. The southern feature is a sunken area, roughly sub-rectangular in plan and aligned east to west, measuring approximately twenty metres in length and fifteen metres in width. It is defined by a single bank about three and a half metres wide and half a metre high. The northern site has a more irregular interior, bounded by a slightly taller bank of around four metres in width and seven tenths of a metre in height, with an outer fosse, which is a shallow defensive or drainage ditch, running along its edge. That fosse is modest in scale, roughly twenty centimetres wide and between twenty-five and thirty centimetres deep, but its presence gives the northern site a more structured character than its southern counterpart. The record was compiled by Geraldine Stout and updated by Christine Baker, with the entry uploaded in January 2015 as part of the broader Archaeological Survey of Ireland.

Mountstuart House itself, recorded separately under the reference DU011-006002, sits in the same landscape and its ruins provide a useful landmark when trying to locate the earthworks, which lie in the field directly to its rear. Because these features are low-lying, they are best observed when the sun is at a low angle, typically in the early morning or late afternoon, when raking light picks out the slight differences in ground level. Visiting in late autumn or winter, when vegetation is reduced, also helps. There is nothing here that announces itself; the value is in training the eye to read ground that has been shaped, however faintly, by people who left no other record.