It shares the space with whatever has taken root around it over the centuries, and the fact that a second standing stone once stood just outside the enclosure, now gone, gives the whole site a quietly incomplete feeling, as though something has been gradually edited away.

The rath, known in Irish as Lios na Gaoithe, meaning fort of the wind, sits at the western side of the landward end of Cromane Spit, a narrow promontory that reaches out into Dingle Bay. Raths, also called ringforts, are the most common archaeological monument type in Ireland, typically dating to the early medieval period and thought to have served as enclosed farmsteads. This one follows the form: a single earthen bank, roughly circular in plan, with an internal diameter of about thirty metres north to south and thirty-five metres east to west. The bank itself reaches a maximum height of two metres and a width of three metres, which is a reasonably substantial construction. What sets Lios na Gaoithe apart from the general run of such sites is the standing stone surviving inside the enclosure at its north-western edge. Standing stones predate the ringfort tradition by a considerable margin, generally associated with prehistoric ritual or burial landscapes, so its presence within a later enclosure raises questions that are difficult to answer cleanly. Was it already ancient when the bank was raised around it? Was it incorporated deliberately? Local knowledge records that a companion stone once stood nearby outside the boundary, adding a further layer of ambiguity to what the original arrangement might have looked like.