The site was once known as Ard-na-nGeimhleach, meaning roughly "height of the fetters" or "height of the captives", and that etymology alone suggests a place where something more than ordinary farming life once unfolded. The ringfort that occupied this summit is largely levelled now, surviving as a broad, raised circular area roughly 37 metres across, its original earthworks worn down by centuries of agricultural use and, by the mid-nineteenth century, the construction of lime kilns, those small stone furnaces used to burn limestone for fertiliser or mortar, placed directly within and against the monument's banks.

The site's historical associations were recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters compiled around 1840, which identify it as the former residence of Fearchios Mac Coman, a poet who, acting on the instigation of the high king Cormac Mac Art, murdered Lughaidh Mac Con, described as king de facto of Ireland and said to have reigned for thirty years. By the time the survey party visited, the place was already "much injured", the circumvallation nearly defaced, though a portion of bank survived in the south-east quadrant at roughly 1.2 metres high and 2.4 metres broad at the top. The original diameter, measured by pace at about sixty-four metres including an external fosse, a defensive ditch running around the base of the earthwork, hints that this may have been a bivallate ringfort, meaning one enclosed by two concentric banks rather than one. Evidence for that outer circuit survives in the east quadrant, where traces of a broad outer bank and a causeway break across the fosse can still be detected. The townland boundary itself curves to respect the monument, incorporating part of the surviving bank, and stone revetment on its north face suggests the earthwork was at some point reinforced or reused as a boundary feature. The survey letters also noted the outlines of at least two rectangular stone foundations visible on the surface within the enclosure, likely the remains of a house that, according to Patrick Power writing in 1908, had stood within the lios, the Irish word for a ringfort enclosure, until comparatively recently.