It is the kind of site that archaeology tends to rescue at the last moment rather than celebrate at leisure, and its invisibility is the most telling thing about it. The earthworks were levelled sometime in the nineteenth century, most likely during agricultural improvement, and the land has since shown no surface trace of what lies beneath.

The site came to light in 1995 when Celie O'Rahilly, then Limerick County Archaeologist, identified the enclosure during advance work for the construction of the Croom bypass. A geophysical survey followed, which detected positive magnetic anomalies to the north and northeast of the main feature, suggesting buried archaeological material in the surrounding ground. Archaeological testing was subsequently carried out in 1997 by Thaddeus Breen under licence No. 97E0400, and the results confirmed the presence of a bivallate ringfort, that is, a roughly circular enclosure defined by two concentric ditches and banks, a form common in early medieval Ireland and typically associated with a farmstead of some status. Immediately to the north lay a second, adjoining ringfort, making this a conjoined monument of the kind known elsewhere in the Irish landscape but rarely encountered in such a thoroughly erased condition. The road corridor cut only into the eastern portion of the site, revealing a possible ditch and external bank to the northeast, along with drainage channels of more recent origin. The remainder of the monument, to the west of the bypass, was left unexcavated.

The unexcavated portion sits in pasture roughly 185 metres west of the River Maigue, whose course also marks the townland boundary with Tooreen. There is nothing to see on the ground, and aerial and satellite imagery taken at various points between 2005 and 2017 confirms this; no cropmarks or soil differences betray the buried features. The Croom bypass itself provides the only reliable landmark. For anyone with an interest in how the archaeological record is built up, this site is a useful reminder that absence of visible remains is not the same as absence of history, and that road schemes have, in an irony not lost on archaeologists, done as much to reveal early medieval Ireland as they have to obscure it.