That combination of uncertainties, a dwelling of indeterminate date tucked off-centre into the south-eastern quadrant of a much older enclosure, is what makes the place quietly arresting. The ringfort itself predates the house; the house came later, making use of the ready-made protection the older earthwork offered, or perhaps simply because the ground was already cleared and levelled.

Ringforts are circular or roughly circular enclosures defined by banks and ditches, built predominantly in early medieval Ireland as farmstead enclosures, though their use and reuse stretched across many centuries. The house site here is sub-rectangular, measuring approximately seven metres north to south and nine metres east to west, and is defined by a low bank that survives to an external height of between 0.25 and 0.4 metres. The setting is a hill among rock outcrops and scrubland that has been recently cleared for grazing, which means the site sits in a landscape that has been worked and reworked over a very long time. The bank at the crest is 0.7 metres wide, with an overall width of 2.1 metres, dimensions modest enough to suggest a structure that was domestic rather than defensive. A hawthorn tree grows on the northern side of the house site, the kind of detail that feels incidental but rarely is in the Irish landscape, where lone hawthorns are often the last living markers of vanished settlements.