The earthworks here, covering an area roughly 130 metres north to south and 160 metres east to west, never made it onto the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840, nor onto its more detailed 25-inch edition of 1897. The settlement simply sat in the grass, unrecorded by cartographers, until aerial photographers spotted something unusual in the summer of 1968.

Those oblique aerial photographs, taken on 20 July 1968 and again on 10 July 1969 as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, were the first to identify the earthworks as the probable remains of a medieval settlement, likely contemporary with, or even predating, the nearby Oola Castle. That castle, a tower house, a compact defensive residence typical of late medieval Ireland, is reputed to have been built by a branch of the O'Briens of Thomond, the powerful Gaelic dynasty of the wider region. A land grant of 1282 records that Ullish, the earlier name for Oola, was granted by the Citizens of Limerick to one J. Fitz Thomas, and by 1572 a figure named Tirrelagh mac Brien held a castle at Knockowlow, the old name for the Oola Hills. The settlement on the slope appears to belong to this broader medieval landscape of lordship and habitation.

What survives on the ground includes a well-defined rectangular platform, measuring approximately 23 metres by 19 metres, surrounded on its eastern side by a fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch. Running roughly northwest to southeast, around 14 metres southwest of that platform, is a sunken road or covered way stretching some 125 metres, the kind of hollowed track worn deep by centuries of use. Beyond it, to the southwest, relic field systems survive with cultivation ridges still faintly visible on the surface. The hummocky, uneven texture of the ground is the clearest indicator that more once stood here. Satellite imagery, particularly Google Earth images from 2014 and 2018, captures these features well, and visiting in low-angled winter light will make the ridges and platforms considerably easier to read from ground level. The site sits about 80 metres northwest of Oola Castle and roughly one kilometre west of the Tipperary county border, with open views north, east, and south across the Limerick plain.