The structure is a cashel, the term used in Irish archaeology for a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, and this one is a fairly modest example, measuring just 18.5 metres across. What complicates it is the state of its wall. The original construction was careful enough, an inner and outer face of large stones packed with smaller rubble between them, but at some point farmers clearing the surrounding fields began dumping their surplus stones on top of and around the wall, scattering them haphazardly along both sides. The result is a genuine puzzle for anyone trying to read the site: the ancient and the accidental are now thoroughly entangled, and gaps in the wall at both east and west offer no clear evidence of where the original entrance once stood.

Cashels of this kind were typically farmsteads, built and occupied during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, when stone was a practical and available building material across much of Munster. This particular example occupies the summit of a northeast to southwest ridge, surrounded on most sides by higher hills, with the southern aspect opening out to long views over Bantry Bay. The interior is level and has been kept as pasture, so the enclosure has continued in agricultural use, as it probably was from the beginning. About a hundred metres to the northwest, a stone row, a linear arrangement of standing stones whose purpose remains debated among archaeologists, adds a second layer of prehistory to the immediate landscape.