Beneath it, or somewhere close by, lies the entrance to a souterrain, an underground passage or series of chambers typically built during the early medieval period for storage, refuge, or both. The shells are an oddity worth pausing over: their presence mixed among the rubble hints at the lives of people who gathered food from the nearby shoreline and, for reasons now obscure, left it concentrated at this spot.

A researcher named Curran recorded the site as a stone cashel, a type of circular or oval enclosure built from dry-stone walling, and noted traces of two hut-sites within its interior. One of those huts apparently served as the access point to the souterrain below, which Curran was told comprised several chambers. The broader survey context comes from J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne or Dingle Peninsula, which catalogued the dense concentration of early remains across this part of Kerry. The Magharees Peninsula, a thin finger of land pushing north into Tralee Bay, sits at the edge of that landscape, and the marshy, low-lying ground around Lough Gill would have been a recognisable kind of early settlement environment, sheltered and close to both fresh water and the sea.