A series of low, linear earthen banks, barely perceptible at eye level, show up clearly only when seen from the air. That aerial remove is what gave them away, the banks appearing on photographs taken as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, a resource that has quietly revealed earthworks across Ireland that centuries of farming and weather have reduced to little more than slight corrugations in the soil.

The banks lie immediately beside one of the more atmospheric medieval sites in the Lough Carra area. Burriscarra Abbey, a Carmelite foundation, and its associated church sit close by, and the earthworks are considered possibly connected to the ecclesiastical settlement that once operated here. That word "possibly" carries real weight in Irish field archaeology, where so many earthworks have lost their documentary trail entirely. Linear banks of this kind can serve a range of functions around a monastic or church site, from enclosing a precinct to managing agricultural land worked by a religious community. Without excavation, the relationship between these particular banks and the abbey beside them remains a matter of reasonable inference rather than established fact. D. Lavelle recorded the site in a 1994 archaeological survey of the Ballinrobe district, which drew together evidence from the Lough Mask and Lough Carra region, and that survey remains the primary source for what little is formally documented here.