It is trapezoidal in shape, measuring roughly twenty metres in length and between six and ten metres wide, and local people have long called it either "Danes' fort" or simply "Liss". Neither name is especially accurate in a literal sense. The Danes had nothing to do with it, and a lios, in Irish tradition, is a ringfort, a type of early medieval enclosure typically used as a farmstead, though this one is more irregular in outline than the classic circular form. What survives is a narrow drystone wall, the kind built without mortar, and even that is poorly preserved.

The attribution to Danes is a pattern repeated across Ireland, where anything ancient and unexplained tended to acquire a Scandinavian association in popular memory, regardless of the actual period of construction. The local name was recorded by the cartographer and writer Tim Robinson, whose painstaking documentation of Connemara's placenames and local knowledge preserved details that would otherwise have been lost entirely. A later field wall has cut through the interior at the north-east and south, which gives some sense of how the site has been treated over the centuries, absorbed quietly into the working landscape rather than marked out or protected. The interior is now overgrown, and without that field wall bisecting it, the enclosure might easily be mistaken for a natural feature of the hillside.