Roughly forty metres across from north to south and thirty-six metres east to west, it was the kind of enclosed settlement, most likely a ringfort, that was common across early medieval Ireland. Ringforts were typically defined by one or more earthen banks and a surrounding ditch, known as a fosse, and served as farmsteads or defended homesteads. By the time anyone thought to investigate this one formally, the monument had been almost entirely erased, leaving only ghostly traces behind.

The enclosure appears clearly on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, with stippling to its north-east and east indicating that gravel extraction was already under way nearby. By the time the revised OS map was produced in 1900, the monument had disappeared from the record entirely, suggesting it had been levelled in the intervening decades, likely consumed by the same quarrying activity that had been eating at its edges. The site might have remained entirely forgotten had an aerial photograph taken in 1995 not revealed a curving cropmark, the kind of faint discolouration in growing crops that betrays a buried ditch beneath the soil, tracing the line of the fosse in the western and north-western sector. The quarry, by then disused and overgrown, was visible immediately to the east, nudging into the enclosure's interior. When archaeological testing was carried out in 2000 ahead of house construction, the investigations were inadvertently focused on the quarry area rather than the monument itself. The work, reported by Hurley in 2000 and again in 2002, found no diagnostic evidence of an ancient enclosure on the proposed development site, a conclusion that makes more sense given that the excavators were, in effect, looking in the wrong place. The house that was subsequently built now sits within the western quadrant of where the enclosure once stood.