The structure is not dramatic in the way that intact monuments can be; it survives only as a low, tumbled outline, roughly 19.5 metres north to south and 22.4 metres east to west. What makes it quietly compelling is less its condition than its position, and the way it fits into a broader pattern of human organisation on an island that most people will never set foot on.

Within the northern portion of the enclosure, the foundations of a rectangular house survive, measuring 7 metres long and 4 metres wide externally, with a doorway set into the north wall. One of the island's field walls runs directly into this enclosure, suggesting it was part of a coordinated system of land use rather than an isolated structure. A small enclosed field, around 40 by 35 metres, lies 50 metres to the south-east, reinforcing that sense of deliberate agricultural arrangement. Around 200 metres to the north-north-west lie early ecclesiastical remains, which places this enclosure in proximity to what was once a monastic settlement on the island. Michael Herity, writing in 1977, recorded the site, and it was later incorporated into the published archaeological inventory of West Galway. Whether the enclosure was secular or had some connection to the monastic community nearby is not something the physical remains resolve on their own, but the spatial relationship between the two is suggestive. High Island, known in Irish as Ard Oileán, sits off the Connemara coast and was associated with early Christian monasticism; the clustering of field systems, enclosures, and religious remains on such a small and exposed piece of land points to a community that worked the ground as well as prayed on it.