Most sites of its type are readily identified as ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that once dotted the Irish countryside in their thousands during the early medieval period. This one is less certain. Archaeologists have raised the possibility that it may instead be a later medieval earthwork, a distinction that shifts its story by several centuries and places it in a rather different social and agricultural context.

The enclosure has been visible on maps since the first Ordnance Survey recorded it in 1843, and it reappears on the mid-twentieth-century edition of 1952 to 53. By the time fieldwork was carried out, the vegetation had grown too dense to measure the full diameter. What could be observed was a substantial scarp, the steep internal face of the earthwork, rising between 1.1 and 2.28 metres, alongside a fosse, that is, a surrounding ditch, roughly 2.1 metres wide and over a metre deep, and an outer bank of earth and stone. In the south-west quadrant, the outer bank retains stone facing on both its inner and outer surfaces, a detail suggesting some deliberate construction rather than simple soil accumulation. Elsewhere, particularly to the north and west, material from the outer bank has slumped or been pushed into the fosse, and the base of the bank in the south-west has been lightly quarried at some point. Satellite imagery captured in 2022 adds a further layer of uncertainty: linear ditches appear as cropmarks to the north-east, east, and south-east of the site. These might represent the ghost of a field system once associated with the enclosure, or they might be nothing more than relatively modern drainage channels, long since filled in and forgotten.