Located 120 metres north of a watercourse marking the boundary with Mitchelstown West, this site first caught archaeologists’ attention in 1984 when Bord Gáis Éireann aerial photographs revealed its distinctive form during gas pipeline surveys. The photographs showed a large rectangular area, measuring approximately 53 metres north to south and 35 metres east to west, clearly divided into two sections by an east-west running fosse, or defensive ditch, crossed by a farm track.

What makes this site particularly intriguing is its potential identification as a moated site, a type of medieval homestead typically dating from the 13th to 14th centuries. These sites were often constructed by Anglo-Norman settlers or wealthy Irish families, featuring a rectangular platform surrounded by a water-filled moat for both defence and status. The earthwork’s proximity to a possible barrow, located 130 metres to the northeast, suggests this area has been significant to local communities for millennia, though curiously, the moated site itself doesn’t appear on any of the Ordnance Survey’s historic maps.

Today, the site’s outline remains visible as a cropmark on modern aerial imagery, with the levelled rectangular area and surrounding fosse still discernible despite centuries of agricultural activity. While the defensive ditches no longer hold water and the platform has been incorporated into the surrounding pasture, the earthwork continues to mark the landscape, preserving the footprint of what was likely once a substantial medieval dwelling. Its survival as a cropmark, revealed through different growing conditions in the soil above the filled-in ditches, provides archaeologists with valuable evidence of Ireland’s complex medieval settlement patterns.