The reality, pieced together by comparing successive Ordnance Survey maps, is considerably more prosaic, though not entirely without interest.

When the OS six-inch map was surveyed in 1842, the site appeared as a circular wooded area, and its shape was enough to earn it a cautious listing as a possible enclosure in both the Sites and Monuments Record of 1992 and the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. These records serve as official inventories of Ireland's archaeological heritage, and a circular earthwork or enclosure would typically indicate something of genuine antiquity. By the time the later OS editions were consulted, however, the picture changed. The 1939 map marks the same area using hachures, a cartographic convention used to indicate changes in ground level or excavated features, and the OS twenty-five-inch map names the site plainly as Quarries (disused). Rather than a lone anomaly, it turns out to be one of several quarries in the same area, the circular outline a product of extraction rather than enclosure.