The older structure is prehistoric, and what makes it quietly arresting is not just its age but its context: this is not an isolated monument but one of three prehistoric farmsteads clustered together in the Coolnatullagh valley, each one suggesting that this upland landscape was once a place of settled, organised rural life rather than a marginal wilderness.

At the south-western edge of the enclosure, the original stone facing is still visible on both the internal and external faces of the wall, which gives some sense of how deliberately these structures were built. To the south, a large field is attached, its boundaries formed by mound walls, and those walls connect to an extensive field system that spreads across Gortaclare Mountain as a whole. In other words, what looks at first like a single farmstead is actually one node within a much larger landscape of prehistoric land management. Small cairns, which in this kind of upland context are often clearance cairns produced by generations of removing stones from cultivated ground, lie to the south, east, and north of the enclosure. A separate smaller enclosure sits about 110 metres to the east. Together these features suggest a prehistoric farming community that organised and worked this valley with considerable care, dividing land, clearing fields, and building in stone that has, in places, lasted to the present day beneath the later walls laid over it.