Rather than construct a freestanding enclosure from scratch, they built only where the landscape demanded it, leaving the geology itself to serve as two of the four walls.

The enclosure measures roughly thirty metres east to west and twenty-five metres north to south. To the north and south, sheer bedrock ridges close off the space entirely, requiring no human intervention. At the western end, a straight run of dry walling, fourteen metres long and standing up to eighty centimetres high, seals off one gap. At the eastern side, a longer curving wall, nineteen metres in length and reaching a metre at its highest, completes the circuit. The result is an enclosed area that is neither fully man-made nor fully natural, but something produced by the collaboration of the two. Enclosures of this kind are found across Ireland, generally interpreted as livestock pens or small farmsteads, though pinning down a precise date or function without excavation is rarely straightforward. What is clear here is that whoever built it had a sharp eye for how bedrock topography could reduce the labour involved considerably.