The structure is modest, roughly nine metres across, defined by a grass-covered bank of earth and stone barely twenty centimetres high at its tallest. What makes it worth pausing over is not its scale but what has been leaking out of it. Rabbits burrowing into the soil to the south-west have been turning up chunks of charcoal, and that detail shifts the enclosure into a different story entirely.

The charcoal points toward industry rather than settlement or ceremony. The working theory is that this little ring on the hillside served as a charcoal-making site supplying the iron smelter that once operated at Lauragh, a few kilometres away, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Producing iron required enormous quantities of charcoal as fuel, and the typical method involved stacking wood inside a low earthen ring, covering it carefully, and burning it slowly in a controlled, low-oxygen environment. A circular earthwork cut into a slope, with a levelled interior, fits that process well. The northern edge of the bank is cut about sixty-five centimetres into the upslope, creating that level floor. Ten metres to the north-east, across the small stream that runs beside the site, there is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site recognised by its characteristic mound of fire-cracked stone, usually associated with the Bronze Age. The proximity of two such different periods of use around the same stream suggests the place drew people back repeatedly, for reasons the landscape itself made practical.