Nobody can say with confidence exactly when they were built or by whom, which gives the site an ambiguity that tidier, better-documented places rarely possess.

The enclosure itself is a bivallate rath, meaning it is ringed not by a single bank and ditch but by two concentric banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them. Raths of this kind are broadly associated with early medieval Ireland, where they served as enclosed farmsteads or settlements for people of some local standing, though the double-bank arrangement was a more substantial undertaking than most. The interior here survives as a semi-circular area, its floor sitting at roughly the same level as the surrounding land, and within it are three sub-rectangular stone structures that may once have been dwellings. The largest lies in the western sector of the enclosure. About five metres to the south-east is a smaller example, measuring 3.5 metres by 2.8 metres, with walls still standing 1.2 metres thick. That wall thickness is notable; it suggests something built to last, or at least built with the materials readily to hand in a landscape where stone was plentiful. The structures were recorded and described in Caroline Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which catalogued the area's field monuments with close attention to what was physically present rather than what could be assumed.