But the earlier six-inch map, published in 1840, had caught it at an intermediate stage of erasure, recording the location under the telling label "Site of Moat", a phrase that carries specific meaning in the conventions of early Irish mapping. "Site of" signalled that a monument had already been levelled above ground, while "Moat" referred to an earthwork, most likely a moated site, a category of medieval enclosure in which a raised platform or island was surrounded by a water-filled or wet ditch, often associated with manorial settlement from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The 1840 map placed the site immediately east of a large, irregularly oval-shaped feature measuring roughly ninety metres on its northeast to southwest axis and about forty-eight metres across, on a rise of mixed scrub and rough grazing ground just south of the westward-flowing Coves Brook. By 1909 even that trace had faded from the cartographic record, with the location shown simply as scrub-covered land, a gravel pit noted to the northeast. What exactly was here, and when it fell into disuse and disrepair, remains unclear. The above-ground evidence is gone, but archaeological features beneath the soil may yet survive, leaving open the possibility that the site holds more information than the landscape currently suggests.