It is not an obvious choice. The ground slopes steeply, the sides drop away sharply, and higher land to the east means the interior could be observed by anyone positioned above it. Yet here, at some point in the past, people built two walls across the neck of the headland, cutting it off from the mainland and creating one of the most austere examples of a promontory fort on the Kerry coast.

A promontory fort is exactly what it sounds like: a natural spur of land, usually coastal, made defensible by constructing one or more barriers across its landward side. The sea does much of the work on the remaining flanks. When Casey surveyed this particular site in 2003, what remained of those barriers was not much to look at. The outermost wall had collapsed and grassed over, surviving mainly as a low, indistinct earthwork, with a slight depression at its base the only evidence of what was once a fosse, the term for a defensive ditch cut to reinforce a bank or wall. The inner bank had fared no better, curving across the headland in a heavily eroded line that required some interpretive confidence to read as a deliberate structure at all. Casey concluded, cautiously, that it did represent the remains of a defensive bank, even if very little of its original form was legible. The headland itself was described as inhospitable, its interior featureless, giving no clue as to who built here or when.