It is not much to look at above the surface, just a single course of stones protruding roughly half a metre out of the earth. But this modest wall predates the bog that now surrounds it, which means the landscape it once divided has long since disappeared beneath several centuries of slowly accumulating peat. A second stretch of the same walling, about twenty-one metres long, lies buried entirely, found only because a peat-cutting exposed it at roughly eighty centimetres below the surface.

What survives above ground extends about twenty metres westward from the river's edge before turning south for a further five metres, forming an L-shape roughly a metre wide. Structures like this are described as pre-bog walls, meaning they were built and in use before blanket bog began to form over the land. In the west of Ireland, this process of bog growth accelerated significantly after the Bronze Age, driven by a combination of climatic deterioration and the effects of early farming, including the clearance of woodland and the compaction of soils. A wall swallowed by peat is, in a quiet way, a record of a farmed or managed landscape that once existed here, parcelled into fields and probably grazed, before the ground became too wet and acidic to sustain it. The Iveragh Peninsula, on which this site sits, contains numerous such traces of prehistoric land use, many of them equally unassuming on the surface.