There is no great castle behind it, no hall, no tower still upright to explain its presence. What survives is the gateway itself, roughly six and a half metres long and just under four metres wide, built from regular mortared courses of uncut stone, with an opening that would originally have been around two and a half metres across. It sits within a moated site, the kind of enclosure defined by a surrounding ditch or earthwork, a form of defended settlement common in medieval Ireland, and the hilltop position gives wide views to the south, which would once have made good practical sense.

The structure raises more questions than it answers. There is no firm evidence for when it was built, beyond the circumstantial fact that moated sites in Ireland are generally associated with the medieval period, particularly the thirteenth century. But the gateway may equally belong to a later phase, possibly serving as the entrance to a hall-house or tower house, two types of fortified residence that became common in Ireland between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. A short, unusually thick section of wall projects from the eastern side of the entrance passage, though whether this was a buttress added for structural support or a remnant of a perimeter wall is unclear. The northwest corner survives intact, but the eastern wall appears to have extended further northward, and the south ends of both side-walls are incomplete. Earlier references by O'Flanagan in 1928 and Price in 1936 noted the site, but its precise history and the sequence of its construction remain unresolved. A preservation order has been in place since 1940, which gives some measure of the site's recognised significance even in the absence of definitive answers.