What makes it worth a second look is its careful geometry: a roughly symmetrical raised area, approximately 20.5 metres east to west and 10 metres north to south, defined on its southern and eastern sides by a scarp roughly two metres high, and enclosed along its northern arc by an earthen bank nearly four metres wide. A fosse, the term for a defensive ditch, runs along the outer foot of that bank, and a three-metre gap in the earthwork at the east-south-east preserves what was almost certainly the original entrance. The whole ensemble is modest in scale but deliberate in layout.

Enclosures of this kind, found across Ireland in various forms, were typically used for settlement, stock management, or some combination of both, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say which function dominated at any given site. The combination of a raised interior, an enclosing bank, an external fosse, and a clearly positioned entrance opening is consistent with early medieval organisation of the landscape, when the management of cattle and the definition of domestic space were often one and the same concern. The site sits in what would have been a sheltered and productive location, on low ground beside tidal water at the edge of a bay fed by the Owenmore and Unshin rivers.