It took a gas pipeline to find it. During construction of the Cork to Dublin pipeline, workers uncovered a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlement, used for storage or as a place of refuge. That discovery prompted closer investigation.

Aerial photography subsequently revealed the faint outline of a large circular enclosure roughly 50 metres in diameter surrounding the souterrain, the telltale form of a rath, the earthen-banked ringfort that served as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland. The enclosure's traces are slight, meaning the banks have been reduced over centuries by agriculture and weather, leaving impressions visible only from above. The site is recorded in Hurley's 1987 survey of monuments uncovered along the pipeline corridor, which documented a number of archaeological features that had gone unrecognised at ground level for generations. That a monument of this scale, sitting prominently on a hilltop in undulating Tipperary countryside, remained unmapped for so long says something about how much the landscape still holds without announcing itself.