To a passing eye it reads as an ordinary boundary, but its unusual subcircular arc, measuring roughly forty metres from northeast to southwest, marks it out as something older and more deliberate than a routine land division.

By the time the third edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1922, the feature had already been reduced to what appeared to be a field wall following a curved line. Beneath that later surface, however, particularly in the northeastern quadrant, the collapsed but substantial remains of an earlier structure survive. Archaeologists have identified this as possibly the wall of a cashel, the term used for a stone-built ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead or defended settlement common throughout early medieval Ireland. Where ringforts in other parts of the country were typically built from earthen banks and ditches, cashels are their drystone equivalents, more prevalent in rocky western landscapes where suitable stone lay ready to hand. The scale of the collapsed wall suggests the original enclosure was a significant construction rather than a modest field boundary, though the extent of the collapse makes a precise assessment difficult.