The river itself serves as a natural boundary between Cahercorney and the neighbouring townland of Ballinard. This earthwork forms part of a rich archaeological landscape; just 280 metres to the northwest sits an impressive complex of twelve monuments, demonstrating the area’s long history of human settlement.

The site first came to archaeological attention during the Bruff aerial photographic survey in 1986, when it appeared as a semicircular cropmark immediately east of a field boundary running northwest to southeast. These cropmarks, visible only from above under certain conditions, often reveal buried archaeological features that are otherwise invisible at ground level. The monument wasn’t recorded on any of the Ordnance Survey Ireland’s historic maps, suggesting it had already faded from local memory before the nineteenth century mapping projects began.

Modern satellite imagery has provided clearer details of the site’s structure. Various orthoimages taken between 2005 and 2020 reveal a subrectilinear earthwork measuring approximately 24 metres from east-northeast to west-southwest, and 31 metres from north-northwest to south-southeast. The site is defined by an earthen bank that adjoins the existing field boundary, a common feature of medieval moated sites which often incorporated contemporary field systems into their defensive layouts. These moated sites typically date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and were built by Anglo-Norman settlers as fortified farmsteads, providing both security and status in the medieval Irish landscape.