On three sides, the land simply drops away; on this fourth, landward side, the wall is all that marks the boundary. It is the kind of feature easy to walk past without a second thought, and yet it carries a question that has never been satisfactorily answered.

The promontory it crosses, known as Shee Head, juts south-westward into Bantry Bay, with views stretching as far as Mizen Head on a clear day. The roughly rectangular headland, measuring around 200 metres north-east to south-west and 120 metres across, has an uneven interior that rises towards its seaward end. Archaeologists have considered whether the wall once delimited a promontory fort, a type of defended enclosure where cliffs do much of the work and a wall or earthwork seals off the accessible landward approach. Such sites are found at intervals around the Irish coastline and typically date from the Iron Age, though some were used across several periods. In this case, however, the surviving evidence has been judged insufficient to support that classification with any confidence. The wall may simply have been a field boundary, doing no more dramatic work than keeping livestock from the cliff edge.