Known in Irish as Lios na Cúlach, the site is a rath, a type of enclosed farmstead built during the early medieval period, typically between roughly 500 and 1000 AD, when such enclosures served as the basic unit of rural settlement across Ireland. What makes this one quietly interesting is less any dramatic scale than the detail that survives in its fabric: a single upright slab lining the southern side of a probable entrance at the east-south-east, and a second stone set half a metre beyond it into the interior, as though the threshold of the place is still legible if you know what to look for.

The enclosure is univallate, meaning it has a single surrounding bank rather than the two or three concentric rings seen at more elaborate sites. That bank averages about four metres wide at its base and is accompanied by an external fosse, a shallow defensive ditch, which reaches between 0.75 and one metre in depth. The bank's apparent height varies considerably depending on where you stand: on the uphill side it rises 1.4 metres above the interior, while on the downhill side it manages less than half a metre. The fosse on the uphill side reads as more imposing than it really is, because the hillslope continues to rise beyond it, lending the whole thing a slightly theatrical quality it hasn't quite earned. The interior measures 23 metres in diameter, and near its centre a faint, sub-circular bank, no more than 0.4 metres high and enclosing a space of roughly two metres across, may mark the footprint of a small hut. The site lies near the head of a small valley carrying a tributary of the Finglas river north-east towards Glenfais, and was recorded in detail as part of J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, Corca Dhuibhne.