Marked clearly on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as an oval, tree-lined enclosure and annotated as a fort on the accompanying OS Fair Plan, the site carried the designation of a ringfort, the circular earthen enclosures used as farmsteads across early medieval Ireland, for well over a century. By 1970, surveyors noted no surface remains whatsoever. Today, the N4 National Road runs through the area, and aerial photography shows nothing at all beneath it.

When archaeologist V.J. Keeley excavated the site in 1990, ahead of motorway construction, the results were striking in their absence. No trace of a ringfort was found. The only feature uncovered was a linear ditch, traced for some 80 metres, measuring 1.5 metres deep and 2.6 metres wide. Its fill of brown clay contained animal bone, charcoal, and a barbed and tanged arrowhead, a finely worked prehistoric projectile point shaped with small notches at its base for hafting to a shaft. Snail shells lining the sides and base of the ditch suggested it had been left open for a considerable period. Keeley concluded that the feature most likely represented an old land boundary rather than any kind of enclosure or defensive structure. The ditch had probably been backfilled during major landscaping work carried out in the 1950s by the Midland Health Board, which owned the land at the time. The oval shape that so convincingly suggested a fort on nineteenth-century maps appears to have been, in all likelihood, a boundary ditch all along, its circular impression on the landscape just persuasive enough to mislead generations of cartographers and recorders.