Karst is the term for this kind of bare, eroded limestone landscape, characteristic of the Burren, where glacial action and millennia of rainwater have dissolved the rock into fissured slabs and shallow depressions. It is the sort of terrain that does contain genuine early medieval remains, which may help explain how a modest modern construction ended up listed alongside them.

The site at Fahee was recorded in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996 simply as an enclosure. Annotated maps from 1994, passed on by a local source identified as T. Coffey, had marked it more dramatically as a fort, a word that in an Irish context typically suggests a ringfort, the circular or oval enclosed farmsteads built in their thousands between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. When someone actually visited in 1999, the reality turned out to be a good deal less venerable. What they found was a subrectangular enclosure roughly twelve metres across, defined by a drystone wall and apparently of modern construction. The gap between how something is labelled on a map and what it turns out to be on the ground is a recurring theme in Irish field archaeology, particularly in landscapes where the built environment has been layered and re-layered over long periods, and where farmers and landowners have historically used the same materials and sometimes similar forms as their distant predecessors.