This was once a cashel, the term used in Kerry and much of Munster for a ringfort enclosed by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, the type of defended farmstead that tens of thousands of Irish families lived within during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. What distinguished this particular example was its position on the northern face of a low ridge overlooking the lough, a placement that would have offered both a degree of elevation and proximity to water, two practical advantages that early farmers and their communities valued considerably.

The site was clearly identifiable on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map, where it appears as a circular enclosure, the standard cartographic shorthand that the nineteenth-century surveyors used to mark out these features across the Irish countryside. It survived long enough to be documented by archaeologists Aidan O'Sullivan and Jerry Sheehan in their survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996. By that point, however, the cashel had already been lost. Land improvement operations carried out in the early 1990s levelled the site entirely, leaving nothing above ground for a visitor or researcher to examine. Whatever archaeology lay beneath, any structural remains, artefacts, or evidence of occupation, was disturbed or destroyed without investigation.