The site at Coolbane was recorded in 1988 as a levelled circular enclosure, the kind of description that in Irish archaeology usually implies a ringfort, a circular earthwork enclosure used for settlement during the early medieval period, reduced over centuries by farming. By 1998, official opinion had shifted and the record was quietly updated to the more prosaic label of quarry.

What survives of the story is modest but telling. The first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 shows a hachured semi-circular depression at the edge of a road, the cartographers' way of indicating a hollow or scooped landform. That shape on the map is what likely prompted the initial enclosure classification. The landowner, however, offers a different explanation for the current state of the ground: earth from a nearby ringfort, recorded separately as CO015-07402, was dumped into this hollow at some point, filling it in and presumably obscuring whatever character it once had. Whether the digging that created the hollow was for road-building material, building stone, or some other local need, the working assumption is now that this was simply an old quarry.