The precise shape of it, as recorded by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp in 1909, was oddly specific: a low mound with a small annex, the whole thing keyhole-shaped in plan, sitting on a cliff roughly a hundred feet above the sea. Earthworks of this kind are broad-category terms for man-made landscape features formed by cutting or banking soil, and they appear throughout Ireland in contexts ranging from early medieval enclosures to prehistoric ritual sites. What made this one worth noting, beyond its unusual form, was its position on a coastal promontory the locals apparently called Meenbaun, meaning "white flat" in Irish, a name that had never made it onto the Ordnance Survey maps of Westropp's day.

Westropp was a prolific recorder of Irish antiquities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his field observations, made at a time when rural landscapes had not yet been substantially altered by modern agriculture or development, captured features that have since vanished entirely. In the townland of Dromnacarra, whatever he saw in 1909 has left nothing detectable at surface level. It is not clear whether the site was destroyed, eroded by the cliff edge, or simply absorbed back into the landscape. The keyhole plan he described, combining a circular or oval mound with a narrower annexe projecting from it, is a relatively rare configuration and might have indicated an enclosure with an attached outer feature, though without physical remains or excavation that can only be speculation.