On the ground, however, there is almost nothing left to see. The enclosure was levelled in the 1970s, and only a few broken stretches of low earthwork survive where a substantial bank once stood.

What was lost becomes clearer when you read what a surveyor found before the damage was done. In 1927, a scholar named Ua Riain documented the site as a fairly well-preserved liss, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was a circular enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch. At that point, the enclosing bank had a diameter of 94 feet, rose to a maximum height of 7 feet, and measured nearly 12 feet thick at its widest. Faint traces of an external fosse, a defensive ditch, ran around the outside. Within the main enclosure sat a smaller inner ring roughly 32 feet across, interpreted as a hut site where people actually lived. More intriguing still was a small stone-built structure found against the outer eastern edge of the bank, measuring roughly 6 feet 9 inches by 6 feet, described as almost square. This may have been part of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that ringfort occupants used for storage or refuge. Four large stone slabs were subsequently removed from the site and broken up, a loss that makes any surviving archaeological potential harder to assess. The gap between Ua Riain's 1927 account and the cleared field of the 1970s is a particularly sharp illustration of how quickly a site that had survived over a thousand years can disappear within a generation.