The site carries a personal name, Elgans Fort, which appears on Ordnance Survey maps going back to 1838, suggesting a long local memory attached to the place, even if the identity of the Elgan in question has not survived into the record.

The monument is a rath, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches and used as a defended homestead rather than a military fortification. Here, the enclosure is broadly oval, measuring roughly 25 metres east to west and between 20 and 22 metres north to south, and it makes deliberate use of a natural rise in the ground, the bank of earth reinforcing what the local topography already offered. At the western side, the external face of the scarp still stands to around 1.2 metres, and a slight depression just outside it, about 2.5 metres wide, may be the ghost of an original fosse, the ditch that would once have run around the perimeter. A cropmark of dry grass traces its outer edge. The interior is now largely inaccessible, choked with heaps of stone cleared from surrounding fields and dense gorse growth. The field boundaries that once enclosed and defined the landscape around the rath were themselves removed during land reclamation, consolidating the area into one large open field, a process that has left the monument somewhat adrift in an altered setting. A further cropmark at the south-east follows the line of one of those removed boundaries, a faint imprint of an older arrangement. Notably, a cluster of related monuments, including another rath, additional enclosures, and a wedge tomb, the wedge tomb being a megalithic burial type dating broadly to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, lies only 100 to 120 metres to the north and north-west, suggesting this corner of Mayo saw sustained activity across a long span of prehistory and early history.