They were simply used as building material, which is both the mundane and extraordinary fact about this site. Ogham is an early medieval script, typically carved as a series of notches and strokes along the edge or face of a standing stone, and was used primarily to record personal names in an archaic form of Irish. Here, stones bearing those names were repurposed as structural elements of an underground passage, their texts partly obscured by fill and shadow, their original commemorative purpose long forgotten by whoever did the building.

The rath itself, a ringfort of the kind that once defined the Irish early medieval landscape, a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and fosse, has not survived well. Earlier surveys gave its diameter variously as 15.24 metres and 24.4 metres, a discrepancy that reflects how degraded the remains have become. What stands now is little more than an uneven platform with a disturbed bank along the northern side. The souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage used for storage or refuge, fares somewhat better. It is L-shaped, with two passages meeting at a pair of low jamb stones only twenty centimetres high, the whole structure so cramped that the passages average between 65 and 70 centimetres in height. Three ogham stones were incorporated into its walls and roof: one serves as a side-stone in passage two, a second does the same in the opposite wall alongside a decorated cross-slab, and a third was laid flat as a roofing slab in passage one. The scholar R. A. S. Macalister attempted readings of all three inscriptions in 1945, deciphering tentative formulas such as LAIDANN MAQI MACORBO and LADDIGNI MAQQI MUCCOI AN, the latter broken off mid-name on a fractured stone. The cross-slab, meanwhile, bears two plain crosses enclosed in circles, the stems extending beyond the circles and ending in forked terminals, a detail that suggests early Christian craftsmanship rather than anything purely functional. What those stones meant before they became roof and wall is, for now, only partly legible.