It is a cashel, which is to say a ringfort built from stone rather than earth and timber, and like thousands of its kind across Ireland it was probably the fortified homestead of a farming family during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. What makes this one easy to overlook is precisely its condition: the limestone boulder wall, once a confident boundary marker for whoever lived within, has collapsed into numerous gaps and is largely swallowed by vegetation.

The enclosure is roughly circular, with an internal diameter of just over twenty-six metres. The surviving wall is modest in its remaining dimensions, around eighty centimetres wide and no more than eighty centimetres high on the exterior face, though these are the measurements of what has endured centuries of weather, field clearance, and slow ruin. The interior ground is uneven and sloping, which reflects both the natural gradient of the hillside and the accumulated disturbance of time. Limestone was the obvious building material in this part of Sligo, where the underlying geology makes the stone both plentiful and workable, and the site would once have commanded a clear view down the slope towards the water.