The enclosure itself is modest in scale, a ring of stone bank about 1.2 metres wide enclosing an interior space of just under three metres in diameter, roughly the footprint of a large garden shed. That compactness is part of what makes it curious. Whatever purpose it served, it was not built for livestock or for sheltering large groups of people.

Enclosures of this kind, low circular banks of stone, appear throughout prehistoric Ireland and are sometimes associated with ritual or funerary activity, particularly when they occur alongside features like stone rows. Stone rows, alignments of upright standing stones set into the ground, are found in some concentration across the Iveragh Peninsula and are generally understood to date from the Bronze Age, though their precise function remains debated. The proximity of this enclosure to the stone row at Gortnagulla, documented by archaeologists A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their survey of South Kerry published by Cork University Press in 1996, raises the possibility that both features were part of the same ceremonial or commemorative landscape, used and understood together by the communities that built them.