A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, typically built during the early medieval period as a farmstead or place of refuge. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. This one presents a different kind of puzzle: it appears on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842 and again on the 1914 to 1915 edition as a clear circular enclosure, yet when surveyors went looking for it on the ground, no surface trace could be found.

The later map edition adds a further complication. By 1914 to 1915, the enclosure appears to have been bisected by a field boundary running north to south, suggesting that at some point between the two surveys a landowner drew a new line through the old earthwork, perhaps to divide a field or consolidate holdings. Whether that division accelerated the erasure of the original banks, or whether the rath was already fading by then, is not recorded. What the maps captured, and what the land has since absorbed, remains an open question. C. Toal documented the site in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, and it is through that work that the discrepancy between the cartographic record and the physical landscape was formally noted.