A small earthen mound, roughly fifteen metres across, has given its name to an entire townland along the south shore of Dungarvan Harbour, and yet the feature itself sits quietly beneath overgrown scrub, easy to miss and rarely visited. The place is known as An Móta, the Irish word for a mote, which in medieval Ireland referred to a raised earthwork, often forming the central element of a motte-and-bailey castle. A motte was typically a man-made or artificially heightened mound of earth, topped with a timber tower or fortification, and surrounded by a lower enclosed courtyard. This one, perched at the eastern end of a low east-west ridge about 160 metres from the harbour's southern shoreline, is modest in scale but persistent in memory.

The connection between the mound and the townland name reaches back at least to the mid-seventeenth century. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a detailed Cromwellian land record compiled to establish ownership and valuation across Ireland following the wars of that period, already records the name Móta for this townland, suggesting the earthwork was a recognised landmark long before anyone thought to map it formally. When the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1840, the feature was marked as a 'Moat', a common anglicisation used at the time for these early medieval earthworks, and by the 1926 edition it was recorded as the site of a Mote. Complicating the picture somewhat is a small quarry that has been cut into the site, measuring roughly sixteen metres east to west and six and a half metres north to south, with a maximum depth of one and a half metres. The upcast material from that quarrying still sits nearby, which means the mound as it survives today may reflect a combination of original earthwork and later disturbance. About 140 metres to the south-west stands Shanacloon church, another early feature in what is clearly a historically layered corner of the Dungarvan shoreline.