What was once a cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort constructed from stone rather than earthen banks, can still be traced on the ground as a subrectangular shape measuring roughly 19 metres north to south and 16 metres east to west. Ringforts of this kind were the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as the enclosed farmstead of a single family, their livestock kept safe within the walls at night.

What gives this particular site a quiet significance is its proximity to a hillfort located just 250 metres to the south. Hillforts are considerably older structures, generally associated with the Iron Age or earlier, and their relationship to later cashels like this one is rarely straightforward. Whether the cashel was deliberately sited near the hillfort out of some awareness of its presence, or whether the association is simply a matter of topography and available land, is the kind of question the surviving remains cannot answer. The ruins were recorded as part of an archaeological survey of the Ballinrobe district compiled by D. Lavelle in 1994, which documented monuments across the Lough Mask and Lough Carra area, a landscape already well known for its density of prehistoric and early historic remains.