But the earthwork in Moorestown carries a label that complicates that reading: the Cassini edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks it plainly as a "Mote", the older spelling for a motte, the raised earthen mound on which a timber or stone tower would have been planted by a Norman lord asserting control over a newly acquired territory. If that identification is correct, this quietly overgrown feature is the remnant of a medieval fortification, its original purpose long obscured by centuries of grazing and encroaching vegetation.

The 1897 edition of the twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey map recorded the mound in some detail, showing an oval platform measuring roughly sixteen metres on its north-west to south-east axis and nine metres across the other way, defined by a scarp, the steep face of a cut or built-up earthwork, and an external fosse, a defensive ditch, visible from the north to north-east. The site sits about fourteen metres north of the Barranahown River, which itself forms the boundary between the townlands of Moorestown and Killeen. Within three hundred metres to the north-west, the same general landscape contains a separate enclosure and a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval settlement, suggesting that this corner of Limerick has been worked, occupied, and contested across more than one period of history.

Today the monument is overgrown and not straightforward to read from ground level. Aerial orthoimages captured between 2011 and 2013, as well as more recent Google Earth imagery compiled in the record by Fiona Rooney and uploaded in August 2021, show the mound still visible from above, with a possible external fosse to the north-east now heavily treed and a faint curving cropmark running east to west in the same area. A further linear cropmark runs north to south and intersects the monument at its western side, hinting at features, perhaps field boundaries or earlier activity, that the pasture surface alone would not reveal. Anyone visiting would need to cross farmland and should seek permission; the earthwork itself is best appreciated by walking slowly around its perimeter and noticing the subtle changes in ground level rather than looking for anything dramatic above the surface.