That uncertainty is precisely what makes the site interesting. A promontory fort is a form of enclosure in which a natural coastal spur, bounded on most sides by sea cliffs, is sealed off across its landward neck by one or more earthen or stone banks, creating a defensible space with minimal effort. Whether that arrangement ever existed here is genuinely unresolved, and the scholarly debate around it has quietly accumulated over more than a century.

The antiquarian T. J. Westropp noted the headland as early as 1911 but concluded by 1914 that it was unsuitable for a promontory fort. Casey, writing in 1999, disagreed, cataloguing it as a potential site on the basis that the headland commands a naturally sheltered mooring and landing place, exactly the kind of strategic position that tends to attract fortification across many periods. What makes the question harder to settle is that a sixteenth-century castle already occupies the promontory, obscuring or overwriting anything that might lie beneath. The local placename 'An Bábhún', meaning roughly an enclosure or bawn (a walled courtyard associated with a tower house), hints that the castle itself may have incorporated some earlier or contemporary enclosing works. Early photographs of the castle add a further layer of ambiguity: they show a slightly sunken lane running across the promontory from northeast to southwest, just outside the present boundary wall, which could represent the eroded line of an old entrenchment. From the air, Casey also observed a faint bank crossing part of the headland. On the ground, this corresponds to a roughly rectangular grassy platform lying immediately east of the castle, around fifteen metres long and ten and a half metres wide, defined along two sides by scarps up to one and a half metres high and bounded on the other sides by cliff edges. Whether this platform preserves the ghost of a much older defensive work, or simply the remains of a hall connected with the castle, remains an open question.