In dry summers, so the tradition goes, the outline of its foundations betrays itself through patches of withered grass, the buried stonework drawing moisture away from the soil above it. It is the kind of visibility that depends entirely on the weather and on knowing what to look for, which means most visitors to the hill would walk across it and notice nothing at all.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by earthen banks and ditches, typically built during the early medieval period as a farmstead or place of refuge. This one, known as Mothell rath, sits close to a graveyard that still exists at the site, though the older burial ground said to lie within the fort itself has left no visible trace. The Reverend William Carrigan, writing in 1905, recorded the local tradition that the church, known as Thomple-Vweahal or the parish church of Mothell, was destroyed by Viking raiders during one of their incursions into this part of the country. The dedication was to St Nicholas, and according to O'Kelly, writing in 1985, the building was eventually repurposed for Protestant worship before being abandoned around 1800. By 1972, when inspectors examined the interior of the ringfort, they found only irregular depressions and faint banks in the earth, with no identifiable structure among them. The interior is now overgrown with scrub and partially given over to conifers, which makes reading the ground harder still.

The hill itself offers wide views across the rolling pasture of the Dinin valley, and the earthworks of the rath are present, if not always immediately legible. The church and its associated graveyard exist now mainly as a problem of soil chemistry and seasonal drought, a site whose most interesting features are precisely the ones that cannot be seen.