Yet someone chose exactly this spot in Garraun, Co. Cork, constructing a roughly circular enclosure across the crown of the outcrop, its interior measuring around 29.5 metres north to south and 32 metres east to west. The elevated position would have kept the interior dry and defensible, while the surrounding wetland added a natural buffer. Enclosures of this kind, broadly described as earthen ringforts or cashels depending on their construction, were a common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, used for farming households as much as for defence.

The enclosure is not built uniformly. An earthen bank, standing to an internal height of about 1.2 metres, runs from the south-west around to the south-east, where the natural rocky scarp of the outcrop takes over and completes the circuit back to the south-west. The builders, in other words, let the landscape do part of their work for them. There are two breaks in the circuit: a gap of roughly four metres in the eastern bank and a more deliberate western entrance about 6.5 metres wide, flanked on each side by a section of earthen bank and a natural rock outcrop. That pairing of constructed and geological material at the entrance gives the approach an oddly improvised quality, as though the enclosure grew around the terrain rather than being imposed upon it. The interior is heavily overgrown today and noticeably uneven, rising higher in the southern half where the underlying rock pushes through the surface.