The Ordnance Survey editions of 1840 and 1897 record nothing here. Only the later Cassini edition of the OSi six-inch map acknowledged anything at all, marking the area as a circular depression defined by a scarp, which is an abrupt slope or escarpment in the ground surface. What lies beneath and around that scarp has been quietly debated by archaeologists ever since.

The difficulty with this site is one of interpretation rather than visibility. When fieldworkers visited in 1978, they recorded what they saw as old quarry depressions cut into the hillside. That reading is plausible, and some of the hollows visible on more recent Digital Globe and Google Earth orthoimages, aerial photographs taken between 2011 and 2013, probably do reflect quarrying activity. But other earthworks in the same area correspond to a recorded field system, and still others appear to cluster around the church and graveyard in a way that suggests the remains of a settled community rather than an extractive one. The most compelling evidence came earlier: oblique aerial photographs taken on 21 July 1967 as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, reference CUCAP ATD049/061, showed the extensive outline of possible settlement earthworks surrounding the ecclesiastical site with considerable clarity. The proximity to a recorded ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of defined boundary, often a raised bank or ditch, that typically enclosed an early Irish monastic or church site, adds weight to the idea that this was once a place where people lived in some organised relationship with the religious community immediately to the south.

The site sits in working pasture, so access requires care and awareness that this is agricultural land. The church and graveyard at Ardpatrick are the practical landmark to aim for, with the earthwork area lying to the north-west on the slope above. The depressions are subtle at ground level and may read as little more than uneven grazing land to the untrained eye. Visiting after a dry spell, when the grass is short, or in low winter sun when shadows pick out surface irregularities, gives the best chance of reading the landscape for what it might once have been.