What the ground does hold, or held until a landowner began filling them in, is a series of shallow rectangular hollows and pits arranged in rough lines across the field. A field report from 1984 described them as likely representing the trenches of opposing forces, and local tradition backed this up with a story of an old battle fought on the spot. The official record followed the tradition. Scepticism, it seems, came later.

The site sits in grassland immediately east of a hilltop enclosure in the townland of Clooncah, and it is the name itself that provides the most suggestive, if still ambiguous, evidence. Clooncah derives from the Irish Cluain Catha, meaning roughly the lawn or meadow of the battle, or simply battlefield. That etymology could point to a genuine historical engagement, now lost from the written record, or it could just as easily have worked the other way, with the name generating the tradition rather than commemorating an actual event. A separate site roughly 800 metres to the north-west has also attracted a battlefield tradition, possibly fed by the same place name. Researchers including Alcock and colleagues, writing in 1999, concluded that the pits are unlikely to have been formed in any military context, and that two opposing armies would have been severely compressed to have left such modest traces across a single field. The origins of the pits remain unexplained.

What survives above ground is faint. The western side of the field retains the clearest impressions of the hollows, and they appear to continue into an adjoining field further west. The place sits in an ordinary agricultural landscape, with nothing to announce its unusual documentary afterlife as a classified, if contested, battlefield.