About 100 metres from the sea, in a rough spread of grassland and rock outcrop on the Galway coast, the land holds the barely legible outline of a circular enclosure, the kind of earthwork once used to define a settlement or enclose cattle in early medieval Ireland. By the time anyone thought to write it down properly, it was already nearly lost.

The geologist G. H. Kinahan visited the site in 1869 and described what he found as a small, nearly circular clay fort, roughly 23 yards (about 21 metres) in diameter, defined by a rampart and a fosse, which is a defensive ditch dug around an enclosure. Even then, he noted, these features had been levelled and the ancient enclosure nearly obliterated. What had actually brought Kinahan to the spot was something older still, and stranger: a cromleac-like structure built into the south-south-western part of the rampart. That structure is now identified as a wedge-tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument built during the later Neolithic and early Bronze Age, typically consisting of a roofed stone gallery that narrows toward one end. It is a striking layering of time: a prehistoric tomb absorbed into the bank of a much later enclosure, and that enclosure itself now reduced to a possible remnant barely distinguishable from the surrounding rock and turf. Killanin and Duignan noted the site in their 1967 guide, but it remains one of those places where the archaeology asks more questions than it answers, particularly about why a later community would build their enclosure around, or against, a much older burial structure.