That ambiguity is not a failure of investigation so much as a summary of it. What is known for certain is that an aerial photograph taken in 1969, catalogued under the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography reference CUCAP AYP 55, captured a continuous circular cropmark at this location. Cropmarks appear when buried features, such as the ditches or banks of an ancient enclosure, affect how crops grow above them, producing patterns visible from the air that are otherwise undetectable at ground level. The photograph suggested something was there. What exactly, and from what period, remained an open question.

Two separate attempts were made to answer it through test excavation, carried out under licences 00E0760 and 03E0467. Both investigations were prompted by proposed development in the area, and between them the site had been artificially raised to a height of two metres on two occasions, presumably as groundworks advanced. Despite this intervention, neither excavation produced sufficient evidence either to confirm the presence of an enclosure or to rule one out entirely. The site record was compiled by Geraldine Stout and later updated by Christine Baker, with the entry uploaded to the record in January 2015. The enclosure, if it exists, remains unclassified and undated.

Parslickstown sits in the flat agricultural land of the Fingal area, north of the city, a landscape that has been under considerable development pressure for decades. Visitors with an interest in the site will find little to see at ground level; the raised ground is the most visible physical trace of the interventions that have occurred here. The interest lies less in what can be observed and more in what the record itself reveals about the limits of archaeological investigation, particularly when development and excavation are happening in close sequence. For anyone working through the Sites and Monuments Record for Dublin, or following up on aerial survey work in Fingal, this entry is a useful reminder that a cropmark on a photograph is a hypothesis, not a conclusion.