It enclosed the top of the hill like a crown, and local memory held that it served as a racecourse during the nineteenth century. Whether the horses ran inside the bank or around its perimeter is the kind of detail that tends not to survive, but the structure itself was clear enough to be recorded from the air and confirmed on the ground when inspectors visited in 1988.

The enclosure's earlier origins are harder to pin down. A roughly circular bank enclosing a hilltop is a form that appears across Ireland in several different contexts, from prehistoric ceremonial monuments to early medieval enclosures, and without excavation it is difficult to say what purpose it originally served before horses and riders gave it a second life. What is certain is that by the time it was mapped from aerial photographs, it had already accumulated at least two histories: whatever it was built for, and what the nineteenth century made of it. That layering is common in the Irish landscape, where earlier earthworks were quietly repurposed rather than demolished. Sometime between 2009 and 2011, however, the feature appears to have been levelled, removing a structure that had survived, in some form, for long enough to become part of local lore.