That difference is not incidental. It tells you something about how this structure was designed to be experienced, or rather, how it was designed to be approached by someone who was not welcome.

The site is a cashel, sometimes called a cahir, which is the Irish stone equivalent of the more familiar earthen ringfort. Where a typical ringfort relies on banked soil and ditches for its enclosure, a cashel uses dry-stone walling, and this example does so on a substantial scale. The interior measures roughly 34 metres north to south and 31 metres east to west, and the wall enclosing it averages 8 metres wide at the base. It is univallate, meaning it has a single line of enclosure rather than multiple concentric rings. Surrounding the wall on the outside is a fosse, a cut ditch, U-shaped in cross-section and running around most of the perimeter at approximately 2.6 metres wide and a metre deep. The combined effect of wall and fosse would have made the site a formidable presence in the early medieval landscape, when cashels like this one typically served as enclosed farmsteads for families of some local standing. The southern stretch of the fosse has largely silted and softened into the ground over the centuries, but elsewhere the earthwork remains legible enough to read clearly.