It consists of a well-preserved rectangular enclosure, roughly forty metres east to west and thirty-seven and a half metres north to south, defined by an earthen bank along its western and eastern sides and by a scarp elsewhere. At its centre sits a smaller, almost square platform, and upon that platform, a low flat-topped rectangular mound, just over five metres long, three and a half metres wide, and about a metre in height. The whole arrangement has the deliberate, considered quality of something built to be looked at rather than lived in or worked from.

In 1916, the historian Knox declared it to be "certainly an ancient work", a reasonable enough conclusion given its solid earthworks and measured geometry. But a closer look at the evidence complicates that verdict considerably. The structure does not appear on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which was produced in the nineteenth century and is generally reliable for recording earthworks of any antiquity. Its absence from that record, combined with its close proximity to Temple House and the particular way it is arranged within the landscape, points instead to a folly, a designed landscape feature of relatively recent date. Follies, in the tradition of eighteenth and nineteenth-century estate design, were ornamental constructions built to evoke age, mystery, or classical grandeur, often with no practical function whatsoever. This one, if that is what it is, does its job quietly and without flourish.

The ruins of Temple House stand nearby, lending the whole scene a layered quality: one structure genuinely decayed, the other perhaps built to suggest the same. Whether Knox was taken in by the folly's appearance, or simply lacked access to the early mapping evidence, the structure remains a small puzzle in the north Galway countryside, its precise origin and patron still unresolved.