The Ordnance Survey's 1839 six-inch map marked the site simply as an oval quarry, its distinctive shape apparently more suggestive of stone extraction than of early medieval settlement. By the 1925 edition the cartographers had revised their reading somewhat, depicting a D-shaped area extending across both sides of a northeast-southwest road, but the underlying earthwork remained ambiguous, partially obscured by a genuine quarry on its northern side. Local knowledge preserved what the maps did not: the site was known in the area as a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically defined by one or more circular earthen banks and ditches, built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. A slight scarp of bank, only twenty to forty centimetres high, still traces the perimeter on the southeast to southwest arc.

The site's fuller story emerged during archaeological testing carried out in 2015, referenced under the licence number 15E0339, when an extensive area southeast of the rath was investigated ahead of a housing development. The testing, reported by McLoughlin, confirmed the presence of an outer bank or fosse, a fosse being a defensive ditch, at the southeast of the site, clarifying that the ringfort was considerably larger and more complex than its battered surface remains suggested. Within that outer zone, excavators uncovered at least five gullies, several of which contained sherds of medieval pottery, pointing to organised agricultural activity in the land surrounding the rath during the medieval period. A large deposit measuring roughly five by four metres, interpreted as either the top of a pit or a fosse, held a concentration of medieval ceramics. Particularly unusual was the discovery of a furnace bottom and an adjacent pit, features associated with metalworking or industrial processes, recorded under the site reference WX041-069. Where possible, all of these features were to be preserved in situ beneath a protective layer, with full excavation reserved for those directly in the path of construction.