Most golfers probably treat it as an inconvenient landscaping feature. It may, in fact, be a surviving fragment of the Pale Ditch, the earthwork boundary that once marked the edge of the zone of English colonial control in medieval Ireland.

The Pale, as a concept, is well enough known, but the physical ditch that helped define it is a good deal harder to pin down on the ground. Researcher Goodbody, writing in 1993, identified this section of bank at Carrickmines as a likely candidate. It sits on a plateau on a north-facing slope of the Dublin Mountains, oriented in a NNW to ESE direction, and the positioning is suggestive: there are wide open views east towards the Killiney coast and south into the mountains, while sightlines to the west and north are more restricted, a pattern consistent with a boundary feature built to monitor or control movement across open ground. The earthwork itself is modest in scale, a flat-topped bank 106 metres long, up to four metres wide and roughly 0.70 metres high. A ditch runs along its western side, about three metres wide and half a metre deep, and there are traces of a second, now silted-up ditch along the eastern side near the southern end. The southern end also has a modern break, suggesting the bank has been disturbed at some point in recent centuries.

The site sits within a golf course, which means access is not straightforward for the casual visitor. Those with a particular interest in the Pale Ditch, or in the wider landscape of late medieval colonial boundaries in Leinster, would need to make appropriate arrangements before heading out. The earthwork is not dramatic to look at, and without some context it reads as little more than a grassy ridge among the trees, but standing on that plateau with the Killiney coast opening out to the east, the logic of the location starts to make a quiet kind of sense.