It abuts a natural cliff along its northern and western sides, the rock doing part of the work that elsewhere would require more building. The bank itself is revetted in stone, meaning the earth has been faced and stabilised with a lining of laid stone to stop it from spreading or slumping. Together, the cliff and the bank would once have defined a sheltered domestic space, most likely a house of some kind, though when exactly it was built and by whom remains unresolved.

The place is recorded under the Irish name Baile Beag, meaning something like "small settlement" or "little town", which hints that this structure may not have stood entirely alone. The description comes from Paul Gosling's archaeological inventory of West Galway, published in 1993, which catalogued sites across the region with enough detail to locate them but rarely enough to date them with confidence. The classification "indeterminate date" is honest rather than evasive; without excavation, a subcircular stone-revetted bank on an Atlantic island could belong to almost any century, and the form itself is ancient and long-lived. What can be said is that someone chose this exposed north-western corner of an island, used the local topography intelligently, and built something that has survived, at least in outline, long enough to be recorded.