The inner ring, just seven and a half metres across, is defined by a low earthen bank on its eastern and southern sides and by a natural scarp to the south-east. Its interior is level, still grazed as rough hill pasture. It is the kind of site that rewards a second glance: easy to walk past, easy to dismiss as a fold in the ground.

Enclosures of this type, formed by an earthen bank encircling a levelled interior, are found throughout Ireland and are generally associated with early medieval settlement or agricultural activity, though their precise function and dating often remain uncertain without excavation. What makes the situation at Killabunane particularly interesting is the relationship between the older earthwork and the later stone-walled enclosure that wraps around it, an irregular shape measuring roughly twenty-four metres east to west and twenty-two metres north to south. That outer enclosure was already present when the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1895, suggesting that at some point in the nineteenth century, or earlier, someone chose to incorporate or work around the ancient earthwork rather than demolish it. Whether that reflected practical convenience or a more cautious attitude towards old ground is impossible to say now, but the result is a layering of two different moments of land use, one inside the other, on a terrace of rough hill ground above a Kerry stream.