The wall runs north to south in a straight line, separating a sizeable promontory from the rest of the island. It has no visible entrance, which is itself unusual, and sheep-shelters have been built against its outer face at some later date, suggesting it retained enough bulk to be useful long after whatever original purpose it served had been forgotten.

A promontory fort is among the older forms of defended enclosure found along the Irish coastline, created by throwing up a wall or bank across the landward side of a headland so that the sea cliffs do the defensive work on the remaining sides. Here, the headland measures roughly 400 metres east to west and 140 metres north to south, with sheer rocky cliffs dropping into narrow sea inlets to the north and south. The enclosing wall, now standing no more than a metre high and about four metres wide including collapsed material, once sat on an earthen bank. Across the eastern half of the interior, and running over the bank itself, are lazybeds, the ridge-and-furrow cultivation strips associated with small-scale subsistence farming, which suggests that later agricultural activity partially obscured the earlier structure. Some stone settings within the interior may be artificial in origin. The western end of the promontory rises to a high flat plateau of exposed rock, which would have made the site conspicuous and commanding. The site was identified and described in a 1999 survey of coastal promontory forts by Markus Casey, and had not been previously recorded before that work.