That association, it turns out, is almost certainly wrong. A cluster of earthworks on a nearby promontory makes a far stronger claim to being the original seat of his power, yet it has remained quietly in the shadow of its more photogenic neighbour.

The promontory fort at Dungory occupies a tongue of land secured on its landward side by a substantial earthen bank and an external fosse, the fosse being a defensive ditch dug to reinforce the bank. A wide gap at the midpoint of the bank, with a causeway laid across the fosse opposite it, marks where the entrance once stood. Just inside that threshold, roughly twelve metres to the north-east, sits a well-preserved bivallate rath, a circular enclosure defined by two concentric earthen banks and ditches, a form typical of high-status settlement in early medieval Ireland. A further curiosity lies outside the fort's defences altogether: a small, low, flat-topped mound measuring roughly eleven metres by eight and a half metres, and no more than three-quarters of a metre high, sits about twenty-six metres to the north-east. Its purpose is unclear, but its proximity suggests it may be part of the same complex. Scholars including those drawing on Westropp's 1919 survey and subsequent researchers have identified this cluster as the most plausible location of the original Dún Guaire, also recorded as Rath Durlais, the chief residence of King Guaire. Several earlier writers, among them O'Flanagan, Fahey, Leask, and Hynes, attributed that distinction to the nearby tower house castle instead, an error that has since been recognised and corrected in the archaeological literature.