That view alone would make it worth noting, but what makes the site genuinely interesting is a long argument about what it actually is. It has been catalogued variously as a straight-walled moher, a mothair, and a square cashel, each term reflecting a slightly different interpretive tradition. The current consensus, supported by several researchers, is that it is best understood as a bawn, a walled enclosure typically built to protect livestock and to reinforce a tower house, rather than an older prehistoric or early medieval ringfort as its listed name might suggest.

The enclosure is a precise rectangular shape, measuring 28.8 metres north-west to south-east and 23.5 metres north-east to south-west, with notably square corners that are unusual for drystone construction of any period. Its walls, built without mortar, still stand between one and two and a half metres high on the exterior face. The original entrance on the south-west wall, 1.6 metres wide, is now blocked, and a partially surviving beam slot on the south side hints at a timber gate structure. No physical connection remains between this enclosure and the adjacent tower house, but a well-dressed corbel, a stone bracket projecting from the exterior of the tower, sits precisely in line with where the bawn wall would have met the building. That corbel, measured at 0.27 metres in length, is the kind of small, easily overlooked detail that carries significant weight in archaeological interpretation: it suggests the two structures were built as part of the same project. The site appears on both the 1842 and 1915 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, drawn with a solid line, indicating that it was already a recognised feature of the landscape well before modern archaeological recording began. It also sits at the southern edge of a much larger field system covering approximately eight square kilometres, a layered, multi-period landscape that stretches across the hillside and places this single enclosure within a far longer story of land use on Slieve Elva.