That ambiguity is itself part of what makes it interesting. The site was recorded around 1942 as a D-shaped ringfort, roughly 25 metres across, defined by an earthen bank about a metre high, with a stream forming its eastern boundary in place of the usual constructed edge. Ringforts, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape, were typically circular or near-circular enclosures of earthen banks or stone walls used as farmsteads during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. A D-shaped variant, using a natural feature such as a watercourse as one side, is a recognised but less common arrangement, and the choice of a stream for that eastern edge suggests a practical economy: the water served as both boundary and resource.

The description comes from a mid-twentieth-century account, preserved in the Sites and Monuments Record and later incorporated into Michael J. Moore's Archaeological Inventory of County Leitrim, published in 2003. Even at the time of that compilation, the fort's exact position within the valley was not established with confidence. Low-lying ringforts like this one were always more vulnerable to agricultural levelling than those on elevated ground, and the bank at a modest metre in height would not have offered much resistance to generations of ploughing or drainage works. The Glenaniff valley setting, a quiet pastoral landscape in one of Ireland's less-visited counties, offers little in the way of landmarks to anchor the record more precisely.