For years it sat in the national records as a possible enclosure, the kind of designation that suggests ancient earthworks, perhaps a ringfort or a stock enclosure of early medieval origin, the sort of thing that draws archaeologists and historians with measuring tapes and notebooks. A field visit in 1999 put the matter straight: it is a sheepfold, a practical, workaday structure built for gathering and managing livestock rather than for any prehistoric purpose.

The mix-up is a small but telling illustration of how difficult it can be to read the landscape from a distance. The record first appeared in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1990 and was carried forward into the Record of Monuments and Places in 1997, each time tagged with that cautious qualifier, "possible". On paper, an enclosure of uncertain date and function in a coastal Kerry townland might well be something ancient. In person, the picture was rather more mundane. Sheepfolds, which are simple enclosures used to pen sheep for shearing, dipping, or sorting, often share enough visual characteristics with older field monuments to cause exactly this kind of initial confusion, particularly when assessed without a site visit.