The promontory is modest in scale, roughly 27 metres along its northwest-southeast axis and 32 metres across, and the defences that once protected its landward side are quietly impressive in section: a stone-faced bank standing close to five feet high, terraced on the inside, backed by a rock-cut fosse dropping to around twelve feet deep. For a site so carefully fortified, the interior tells a surprisingly sparse story.

When the archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly excavated here in 1952, he found almost nothing in the way of habitation evidence. Two hearth sites and a single post-hole were the sum of it, leaving open the question of whether this was ever a place of sustained settlement or something used more intermittently, perhaps as a refuge or a lookout position. Promontory forts of this kind, where a natural coastal projection is sealed off at its neck by a bank and ditch, are found widely along the Irish Atlantic seaboard and are generally considered to belong to the Iron Age, though many were used across long periods. An earlier scholar, T. J. Westropp, had recorded an outer bank and terracing at Scobaun in 1914 and 1915, interpreting these as part of the original defences. O'Kelly's sectioning work revealed them to be modern in origin, a reminder of how readily later activity can complicate the reading of a site that appears, on the surface, entirely ancient.

The promontory is now under rough grazing, and both seaward edges of the defences are losing ground to erosion, the slow arithmetic of Atlantic weather and a coastline that is not inclined to wait.