That it is also a cilleen, a children's burial ground of the kind once found throughout Ireland where unbaptised infants were laid to rest outside consecrated ground, makes the site a layered one: a place of old sorrow, ancient writing, and an identity that has shifted across the centuries between fort, burial ground, and something harder to categorise.

When the nineteenth-century antiquarian R.R. Brash visited, he found a circular earthwork roughly fifteen feet across, irregular and unfenced, raised slightly above the surrounding field and, as he put it in 1879, 'stuck full of Dallans, from 12 in. to 4 ft. in height, several of which are inscribed.' Dallans are small upright memorial stones, and here several bore ogham inscriptions. Brash also noted a local tradition that a church had once stood on a rectangular patch of untilled ground a few yards away, though no physical trace of that building remained even then, and none is apparent today. The earliest Ordnance Survey mapping depicted the site as a small circular enclosure, and it was listed in the name books as both a fort and a burial ground, a dual description that reflects the genuine uncertainty around sites of this kind, where early ecclesiastical use and prehistoric earthworks often occupy the same ground. By the 1940s, iron railings had been erected to define and protect the area, giving it its current rectangular shape. Researchers Hitchcock and Macalister recorded eight individual ogham stones at the site, though two of these were later recognised as joining fragments of a single stone. At least one further stone appears to have been removed in more recent years.