The circle, which encloses a modest area of roughly seven metres by four metres, was reputedly exposed by Lord Clermont around 1840, when the ground level around the stones was lowered to reveal them. Estate workmen subsequently re-set the stones on more than one occasion, which goes some way towards explaining the irregular spacing and surface mobility that later researchers found so troubling. An Ordnance Survey sheet from 1907 also records five additional stones to the east, concentric with the main circle, and the sites of four standing stones lie approximately forty metres to the south-west, suggesting that whatever the circle's origins, it sits within a broader landscape of features worth taking seriously.

The doubts were articulated most directly by Tempest, writing in the County Louth Archaeological Journal in 1942, who pointed to the small scale of the oval, the moveable condition of the stones, and their uneven arrangement as grounds for scepticism. Davies, writing in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology in 1939, added that the monument does not conform to any recognised stone circle type, which is itself a curious detail; even imperfectly preserved prehistoric circles tend to echo known regional forms. A further complication arises from a note by Borlase in 1897, who recorded what sounds like the same site, or one very similar, at Dromiskin rather than Ravensdale. Dromiskin was also a Clermont estate, and the suspicion is that a genuine prehistoric monument at one location may have been transplanted, replicated, or simply misremembered in connection with the other. Whether Lord Clermont uncovered something real and then had his workmen tidy it into a more pleasing shape, or whether he conjured the whole thing from scratch as a romantic garden feature, remains an open question.