The turlough itself, a type of seasonal disappearing lake found mainly in the limestone karst of the west of Ireland, fills and empties with the water table, and whoever built this structure chose to look out over it. What exactly they built, however, has proved surprisingly difficult to pin down.

When McCaffrey catalogued it in 1952, the site was described as an oval stone fort, roughly 37 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west, defined by a bank of earth and stone with a narrow external fosse, a defensive ditch, running around it. By the time inspectors visited in December 1982, the picture had shifted: the monument was poorly preserved, the enclosing bank read as more rectangular than oval, and the fosse had silted up entirely and left no visible trace. Then, on a re-inspection in October 2001, double-wall facing became apparent at the east-south-east, which pointed toward a different classification altogether. A cashel is a type of stone-walled ringfort, its enclosure built from dry-stone rather than earthen material, and that double-facing suggested the bank here had once been a proper stone wall rather than a simple earthwork. Almost fifty years after it was first recorded, the site had effectively changed category. Tractor ruts running east to west just inside the northern edge of the enclosure were also noted by that point, a reminder of how actively agricultural land reshapes what survives. A possible hut site lies roughly 25 metres to the south, hinting that the enclosure was not entirely alone in the landscape.