It appeared on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, carefully noted by the surveyors of the time, but by the revised edition of 1899 to 1902 it had been dropped entirely, either too degraded by then to map with confidence, or simply overlooked. On the ground today, a modern field boundary cuts straight through its centre northeast to southwest, and the southern half is largely buried under dense vegetation. It is the kind of place that exists more clearly in archive photographs than in anything a visitor would see underfoot.

What rescued the site from complete obscurity was an aerial photograph taken on 13 July 1989. From altitude, the northern half of the enclosure re-emerged as a cropmark, the differential growth of crops above buried ditches tracing an arc roughly forty metres in diameter. Cropmarks form when buried features such as ditches retain moisture differently from the surrounding soil, causing the vegetation above them to grow at a different rate, making invisible archaeology briefly legible from the air in dry summers. In this case the photograph revealed two closely spaced fosses, the parallel ditches that once defined the enclosure boundary, and hinted at the scale of what lies beneath the turf. The site does not stand alone: a multivallate ringfort, meaning one defended by several concentric banks and ditches, sits about 140 metres to the north, and a separate enclosure was noted roughly 250 metres to the northwest by the antiquarian Prim, writing in 1872 to 1873. An associated field system surrounding the enclosure is also visible as cropmarks on aerial photographs, suggesting this corner of Kilkenny once held a more organised and substantial settled landscape than its current appearance would suggest.