The site carries the name Gorteenflugh Fort, yet what stands on the ground today is a rectangular area, roughly 48 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south, enclosed by drystone walls. That discrepancy, between name and current form, is where things get interesting.

The earliest cartographic evidence comes from the 1842 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which depicts the site as a subrectangular enclosure with a notably wide perimeter, around ten metres across. That kind of broad earthen bank is a feature associated with early enclosures, sometimes ringforts, sometimes enclosures of uncertain date or purpose. By the time the 1920 edition of the same mapping series was produced, the site had been reduced, at least on paper, to an ordinary rectangular field. Whether the 1842 representation reflects a genuine early enclosure since lost to agricultural use, or whether that earlier map was simply mistaken in its reading of the landscape, remains unresolved. The site sits in a slight hollow on undulating ground with exposed rock outcrop, the kind of terrain common across the limestone-rich stretches of Clare, where the line between ancient monument and field boundary can be frustratingly thin.

What survives now are the drystone walls defining that rectangular area, quietly present in the landscape without advertising their ambiguity.