What appears at first glance to be a series of unremarkable grassy humps and shallow ridges is, on closer inspection, the ghost of a fortified domestic complex, its outlines pressed into the earth rather than rising above it.

The platform once supported a castle and its bawn, an enclosed courtyard typically defined by a stone or earthen wall and used to shelter people, livestock, and goods in times of trouble. Along the northern side of the bawn interior, a slight bank survives, roughly thirty centimetres high and a metre wide, which may represent the collapsed remains of that enclosing wall. At the north-east angle, the bank turns southward for around eight metres before stopping some four metres from the eastern edge of the platform. Running at right angles to this northern bank are several short low banks, the longest reaching about six metres, with a further stub of around three metres projecting from the eastern side. These perpendicular earthworks are thought to be the footprints of buildings that once stood against the inner face of the bawn wall, sheltering in its lee. The whole arrangement may correspond to a stone house marked in this general area on the Down Survey maps of 1655 to 1656, the remarkable mid-seventeenth-century cartographic project that documented landholding across Ireland in the years following the Cromwellian conquest.