The earthworks are subtle enough that they only became legible when aerial photography, specifically a Google Earth image captured in February 2009, revealed cropmarks suggesting buried structures. What makes the site particularly curious is that it may preserve the physical ghost of a small settlement described in precise, almost domestic detail by seventeenth-century surveyors.

The paper trail is unusually coherent for a site of this kind. The 1654 to 1656 Civil Survey of Limerick recorded that the lands of one John Lissaght at Kilcurly contained 'one good dwelling house, ten Cottages, and one Salmon weare seate upon it,' a reference compiled by Simington in 1938. A salmon weir, worth noting, was a fixed structure placed across a river or stream to trap fish, and its presence alongside cottages and a dwelling suggests a working, self-contained estate. Just a few years later, the 1657 Down Survey map of Kenry Barony, a systematic land mapping exercise carried out under Cromwellian administration, depicted the chapel of Kilcurly with a substantial dwelling to its south-west and a second building further south. Whether the ten cottages mentioned in the Civil Survey clustered around that dwelling or were scattered across the wider townland is not recorded. Earlier still, a 1587 grant described the same lands as containing three messuages, two cottages, arable and pasture ground, and the foundation of a watermill. By 1595, Queen Elizabeth had granted half a carucate, an old measure of land roughly equivalent to what one plough team could work in a year, to Henry Wallop.

The earthworks at Kilcurly sit within a curvilinear enclosing bank, the kind of boundary that often signals earlier, possibly medieval, organisation of a landscape. Rectangular outlines are visible in the north-east quadrant, and ridge-and-furrow cultivation marks, the parallel raised beds left by repeated ploughing, appear in adjacent fields, though these are likely post-1700 in date. The 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records the field as an area of rock outcrop, which complicates interpretation; some of what looks like structural earthwork may be natural topography. Visitors approaching from the road to Kilcurly House to the north will find the site set against surviving field boundaries, and the nearby medieval chapel provides a fixed point of reference. The cropmarks that prompted the original survey are most legible from aerial views, so consulting the Google Earth record alongside any ground visit will help distinguish what is genuinely visible underfoot.