Early records from 1992 and 1996 logged the site as an enclosure, the kind of designation usually applied to ancient ditched or embanked boundaries of archaeological significance. The classification rested on a small irregular hachured area, that is, a shaded patch indicating a slight surface feature, visible on the 1916 Ordnance Survey six-inch map. It was, in other words, a cartographic misreading elevated into the archaeological record.

When the site was physically inspected in 1999, the reality proved considerably more mundane, though no less interesting for that. The depression was a quarry, recognised locally by that name, and had been dug to extract building material rather than to enclose anything. The larger-scale Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch map had in fact indicated both a quarried area and a limekiln nearby, and the two features are thought to have functioned together. A limekiln is a stone-built furnace used to burn limestone at high temperatures, producing quicklime for use in mortar, whitewash, and agricultural soil improvement. The proximity of the quarry strongly suggests the stone was extracted on site and processed in the kiln, a common and practical arrangement across rural Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What had appeared on paper as a possible prehistoric enclosure was, in all likelihood, a small industrial operation serving a local farm or townland.