Whatever its original purpose, what survives in Baile Ristín on the Dingle Peninsula is a densely overgrown stony mound whose outlines are just legible enough to suggest something more deliberate than a natural rise. Early Ordnance Survey recorders described it as a circular fort roughly one chain, or about twenty metres, in diameter and five feet high, composed of earth and stone. Today that mound measures approximately twenty metres on its north-west to south-east axis and eleven metres across, its surface so thickly grown over that the structural detail beneath it is only partly recoverable.

Within the mound, the outline of at least one hut-site can be traced, and possibly two. A clochán is a small dry-stone beehive hut, a form of construction long associated with early Christian monastic settlement in the west of Ireland, built without mortar by corbelling flat stones inward until they meet at a single point. At the north-west end of the mound, a roughly circular area measuring 7.4 metres by 6.6 metres is enclosed by walling that still stands up to two metres high on its outer face, though it is defaced and partly collapsed throughout. An entrance gap on the south-east side appears to lead toward a second possible hut. The association with lepers suggested by the place name is not explained by the surviving evidence, but such place name references are not unusual in early medieval Ireland, where leper communities occasionally occupied peripheral or marginal ground. The fullest published account of the site appears in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, which catalogued the remarkable concentration of prehistoric and early Christian monuments along the Dingle Peninsula.