It is the kind of structure that rewards attention precisely because it asks so little for itself, an oval roughly twenty metres along its longer axis and fifteen metres across, bounded by a wall about one and a half metres wide. Enclosures of this type are scattered across the Irish uplands, and their exact purposes often remain open to interpretation; some served as livestock pounds or animal enclosures, others as domestic or agricultural compounds associated with seasonal settlement. What makes this one quietly notable is its setting within what appears to be an extensive surrounding field system, suggesting it was once part of a more organised and perhaps more populated landscape than the mountain now implies.

The enclosure was identified and noted by Ros Ó Maoldúin, and its presence confirmed through Digital Globe satellite imagery captured between 2011 and 2013. That it came to wider attention through remote sensing rather than ground survey is itself telling; upland areas like Gortaclare can hold considerable traces of past land use that remain largely invisible at ground level until seen from above. The associated field system, recorded separately, points to a period when the slopes of this mountain were worked and managed in ways that the current bare terrain gives little indication of.