Both have been largely levelled by time, reduced to low ridges of earth and stone, but their outlines remain readable on the ground: the inner bank runs roughly a metre wide and survives to about 60 centimetres in height, while a second, slightly wider bank a short distance to the south can still be traced as a faint swell in the landscape. This is the basic logic of a promontory fort, a defensive form common along the Irish coastline, where builders exploited natural geography to do most of the work. Here, the low cliffs along the western, northern, and eastern edges of the rocky shelf provided three sides of the enclosure for free; the banks at the southern neck were all that was needed to seal it.

The place carries its history in its name. The anglicised form, Donaghintraine, preserves an older Irish original recorded by the local historian T.L. O'Rorke in 1890 as either 'Dun Contreathain' or 'Dun Cintreathain', the word dún referring to a fortified place or stronghold. O'Rorke also recorded that a significant battle was fought at a fortress on this spot in 1249, between Felim O'Conor and the Berminghams, a powerful Anglo-Norman family who had established themselves in Connacht following the invasion of the previous century. O'Conor, from the great Connacht dynastic family, emerged victorious. The site appears by its anglicised name on the 1913 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a quiet acknowledgement that even then the place retained some local identity, though the earthworks that gave it its meaning had long since begun their slow return to the ground.