That impression is not entirely wrong; over the centuries, generations of farmers have added to the confusion, piling stones against the north-west arc of the structure and running a later field boundary directly over its wall. The result is a palimpsest, one era of land use quietly burying another.

The site is a cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, a form particularly common across the rocky landscapes of the west of Ireland. Cashels typically enclosed a single farmstead and its outbuildings during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and were home to farming families of modest local standing. This example, recorded by McCaffrey in 1952, measures roughly 33.5 metres east to west and 26.5 metres north to south, making it a reasonable size for the type. Its defining drystone wall, built without mortar in the tradition of the region, has long since collapsed, and several of the gaps visible today appear to be modern breaks rather than original entrances. Sitting about 120 metres from the eastern shore of Dunbulcaun Bay, it would once have commanded a clear view westward over the water, a position that combined practical drainage on a sloped site with proximity to coastal resources.