What they are passing is the remnant of an early Irish caher, a term for a stone-walled fort or enclosure, that once stood substantially enough to be mapped on the first Ordnance Survey sheets in 1842 and again on the revised edition in 1915. Today its banks barely clear head height along the best-preserved stretch, and much of what you see is earth as much as stone, but the scale of the original is still legible: the enclosure runs roughly 130 metres on its long axis and about 80 metres across, with the south-eastern bank, where a few large boulders still sit in the fabric, offering the clearest sense of the original structure.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited in 1901 and recorded what was already a fragment of something larger. He described a half-moon bank of earth and large blocks resting on drift deposits with no proper foundations, and estimated the mounds had once extended for around 620 feet, enclosing a space roughly 430 feet long and 280 feet deep. He noted that the sea had eaten significantly into the shore before the road and quay wall were constructed, taking a portion of the monument with it. More striking still is his mention of a peel tower, a small defensive tower of a type common in late medieval Ireland, that once adjoined the caher but had, by his time, entirely perished. No trace of it has been identified since.

The south-eastern bank, where an old laneway runs parallel, is the easiest section to read. Large trees now grow along it, and some cement has been patched onto the bank at points where disturbance has occurred. The interior is rough and uneven, churned by livestock over time, and a slight hollow noted in the eastern sector has not been conclusively interpreted. The north-western side of the monument was almost certainly clipped by the construction of the modern road, which now forms that boundary. What remains is protected under a preservation order, but the caher sits quietly in its field, overlooking the bay, more agricultural in appearance than monumental.