The first record comes from the Ordnance Survey's six-inch mapping of 1837, when surveyors working on foot traced the enclosure's outline onto paper as part of the great national cartographic effort of the early nineteenth century. The second came from above, in a Digital Globe aerial photograph taken in November 2011, in which the monument's outline remained clearly visible from the air.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval monument in the country. Ringforts are typically circular enclosures defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and were used primarily as farmsteads between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. Tens of thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, though many have been lost to agriculture and development. That this particular example could still be picked out from a satellite image in 2011 suggests its earthworks retain enough definition to register as a distinct feature against the surrounding ground, even if the monument is no longer prominently visible at surface level.