The first-edition OS map shows a sub-circular ring of hachures at this location, the cartographic shorthand surveyors used to suggest a raised or depressed landform, possibly a mound or a ringfort that had already fallen into poor condition by the time the mapmakers passed through. Go to the spot today and there is nothing to see. No earthwork, no raised ground, no enclosing bank. Whatever was there has either been levelled by centuries of agriculture or was already so degraded when it was first recorded that its nature was largely a matter of interpretation.

Ringforts, known in Irish as ráth or lios depending on their construction, were enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and they survive in their thousands across Ireland. Most are obvious enough: a circular bank and ditch enclosing a flat interior, sometimes with an entrance causeway still legible in the turf. The site at Farrannacarriga fits none of that description now, and even the cartographic evidence is ambiguous. The hachures on the first-edition map might have indicated a mound rather than a ringfort, which would imply a different function entirely, perhaps a burial monument of much earlier date. The 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey compiled by J. Cuppage catalogued the site but could not resolve the uncertainty, and it remains unclassified.