What makes it quietly arresting is the deliberate levelling of the interior: the ground inside has been built up on the downhill side to create a flat platform, a small but telling piece of engineering that speaks to the care taken in its construction.

This is a cashel, the term used for a ringfort, which is a roughly circular enclosure typically dating from the early medieval period, built using stone rather than earthen banks and ditches. The Gortnalicky example measures approximately 26 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west, and the surviving wall still stands to an internal height of around 1.2 metres, with the outer face somewhat lower at 0.8 metres. Ringforts of this kind were almost certainly farmsteads, used by farming families as enclosed settlements, with the wall serving as much to manage livestock as to provide any serious defence. The interior here shows the faint corrugations of old cultivation ridges running on a north to south axis, suggesting the enclosed ground was at some point worked as garden or tillage land, a use that postdates the original function of the enclosure and may have continued into relatively recent centuries before the whole site was given over to pasture.