Two straight banks and an intervening fosse, the fosse being the ditch cut between defensive ramparts, mark this out as a promontory fort, a type of coastal enclosure found throughout Iron Age and early medieval Ireland, where natural cliff edges on two or three sides did much of the defensive work. What makes this particular headland quietly puzzling is not the fortification itself but five large, subrectangular enclosures with hollow interiors lined along the bank, structures that sit awkwardly between several possible explanations.

When the site was assessed in 2002, the surveyor Casey could not settle on a single function for these enclosures. Kelp storage and burning was one possibility; coastal communities in Kerry and elsewhere along the western seaboard harvested and burned seaweed in stone-lined pits to produce alkali for the glass and soap industries, a trade that thrived into the nineteenth century. Quarrying was another candidate. But the regularity of the enclosures and the presence of stone within their perimeters also pointed toward house-site foundations, suggesting that people may have lived within the fort's defences at some point. A small offshore islet nearby, named Pierce's Island, adds a further layer of ambiguity, showing traces of what may be two additional house foundations. The interior of the headland itself is largely featureless apart from faint traces of a perimeter bank along the northern cliff edge, and access to the sea from within is described as possible only with great difficulty. A Land Commission field boundary, one of the administrative divisions drawn up during twentieth-century land redistribution schemes, now runs along the shoreline and cuts the headland off from the flat, fertile pasture of the surrounding area, a modern line imposed across something far older and still only partially understood.