It is a modest feature, easy to overlook, yet it is one of the last legible traces of what was once an elaborate complex of enclosed field plots, earthen banks, ditches, and at least one fortified house, all of which have largely vanished into the Mayo landscape over the course of the twentieth century.

When the antiquarian H. Knox visited the site in the early 1900s and published his account in 1911, he found an extensive arrangement of rectilinear enclosures he described as baileys, a term borrowed from castle terminology to describe enclosed yards or courtyards, associated with a moated site and Island House, a fortified house. The field plots covered an area of roughly 190 metres north to south and 150 metres east to west, defined by banks and ditches, though even then the ramparts were much ruined and the ditches much filled. By the time the site was examined more recently, almost all of it had been levelled. One rectangular plot, measuring 45 metres by 21 metres, survives immediately south of the moated site, its northern edge formed by the fosse, or defensive ditch, of that enclosure, and its other sides marked by a low earthen bank with a shallow external ditch. A later field wall cuts across its south-eastern corner. Knox also noted remnants of a possible stone castle and two further buildings within the complex, none of which leave any trace at ground level today.

The scarped platform on the knoll is the most evocative survival. Knox described it in 1911 as a flat platform roughly thirteen yards square, three to four feet above the surrounding level, with a slight trace of a small rampart along its northern side, and speculated that it may have functioned as a guard-house or watch-house, offering a look-out to the west. The scarp, still around 0.7 metres high and well defined on its northern and eastern sides, remains largely as he saw it, which is itself a quietly remarkable fact given how thoroughly the rest of the complex has been erased.