What makes the site quietly puzzling is not merely its age or its location, but the fact that two careful observers, decades apart, looked at the same ruins and described something quite different.

The site, known as Cathair Nua, was noted on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map as a circular enclosure containing three huts, though the accompanying Ordnance Survey Memoir recorded the clocháns, small beehive-shaped stone cells common in early medieval Ireland, as being in such ruinous condition that their plan could not be determined. In 1858, the antiquary Du Noyer measured the cashel wall at roughly 75 feet in diameter and 8 feet thick, its outer face sloping inward toward what appeared to have been a parapet. He recorded three conjoined circular huts filling much of the interior, the easternmost around 17 feet across internally, with its entrance facing south-east and a narrow passage leading south to a very small circular chamber. A second passage to the west connected to a third hut of nearly the same diameter. By the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map in 1895, the enclosure appeared roughly oval and seven circular structures were marked inside it. When the scholar Macalister visited in 1899, he disagreed substantially with Du Noyer's interior account, finding instead about ten heaps of stone, possibly the collapsed remains of former clocháns, and the foundations of just two conjoined huts accompanied by a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage that typically served early Irish settlements for storage or refuge. Macalister did accept Du Noyer's description of the enclosing wall, but calculated the enclosure as considerably larger, between 80 and 105 feet in diameter. Whether the site had changed, or the two men simply interpreted the same rubble differently, remains an open question.