On the southern, northern, and south-eastern sides, the lough wraps around the promontory; on the remaining landward edges, whoever built this place dug a wide, deep fosse, a defensive ditch, still partly waterlogged today, and threw up a substantial earthen bank behind it. The result is an enclosure that is almost entirely surrounded by water or by the threat of it, measuring approximately 71 metres north to south and 62.5 metres east to west.

A single gap in the bank on the south-south-west side, paired with a causeway crossing the fosse, marks what appears to be the original entrance, the one controlled point where people and goods moved in and out. Inside the enclosure, near the north-east end, a small and roughly circular depression sits in the ground, less than a metre deep and only about four and a half metres across. Its purpose remains open. The depression could be the footprint of a former hut, the kind of slight hollow that a timber or stone structure leaves behind after centuries of collapse and vegetation. Davies, writing as part of an Irish Tourist Association survey in 1942, offered a different reading: that the hollow might be the remains of a lime kiln, a small furnace used to burn limestone into quicklime for agricultural or building use. Neither interpretation has been settled definitively, which gives the site a quietly unresolved quality that much more prominent monuments lack.