What makes it awkward to classify is a single, nagging detail: a large flat slab near the centre of the enclosure, bearing a small circular depression, which may be covering the entrance to a souterrain. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, and its possible presence here pulls the site in a direction that the earthwork's outer form does not obviously suggest.

On the surface, the enclosure looks very much like a moated site, the kind of rectangular, bank-and-fosse farmstead that Norman colonists built across Ireland during the 13th and early 14th centuries. Those sites, however, are concentrated in the south and east of the country, which makes a Kerry example unusual in itself. The earthwork measures 43 metres internally, and the bank survives best along the north and west sides, where it rises 3.45 metres above the base of the fosse at the north-west corner. Along the south, erosion has reduced it considerably. The western section is unusually well preserved partly because a field wall was built along the outer edge of the fosse, and the hollow was at some point used as a laneway, both of which inadvertently protected it. The probable original entrance lies midway along the south side, a gap 1.6 metres wide with a single stone slab set into one edge, hinting that it may once have been faced with stonework. Inside, the ground is crossed by north-south cultivation ridges, and a low mound roughly 9 metres square sits just south of centre. In 1937, an investigator named O'Connell probed the mound and a second one to the north, finding continuous layers of stone just below the surface. He dug a small pit nearby, uncovering what appeared to be a deliberately laid spread of flat stones, beneath one of which lay a small square flint flake. He also recorded that loose earth trickled into his probing holes, as though a void existed underneath. Whether a writer named Ashe, who noted in 1954 that the slab sealed a souterrain entrance, was drawing on independent local knowledge or simply echoing O'Connell's findings is not clear. The question of what lies beneath remains genuinely open.