It stands about a metre high, which is enough to suggest it was once considerably taller, and the shape it encloses points not to a fort or a field boundary but to a house, the kind built by ordinary people over many centuries of Irish rural life.

O'Shea and Crowley, writing in 1972, identified the structure as the probable remains of a vernacular house, meaning a dwelling built in a local tradition using local materials, without a formal architect and without any ambition beyond shelter and practicality. Vernacular buildings of this kind were typically constructed with thick dry-stone or mortared walls, sometimes roofed with thatch or sod, and they were home to farming families across Cork and the wider west of Ireland from the medieval period well into the nineteenth century. Many have collapsed entirely or been absorbed back into the landscape; the fact that the walls here survive to a metre in height is relatively unusual. The rectangular plan, as opposed to the oval or sub-circular footprints associated with earlier prehistoric structures, suggests a date broadly within the post-medieval period, though without excavation it is impossible to be more precise.