What makes this particular example arresting is not just its age but what came after it: at some point the interior was repurposed as a cillín, a children's burial ground, the kind of unconsecrated site where unbaptised infants were laid to rest in Irish communities across centuries. The overlap of Early Medieval enclosure and unofficial burial ground is not unheard of in Ireland, but it gives this Kerry hillside an unusually layered gravity.

The ringfort itself was recorded in 1986 by the Castleisland District Archaeological Survey. Ringforts, known in Irish as ráth when earthen in construction, were the dominant settlement form in Early Medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. The Dromultan example measures approximately 45.5 metres in diameter, defined by an earthen bank that rises around 1.15 metres on its interior face and nearly 1.9 metres on the exterior, with a fosse, or external ditch, running around it. A gap of roughly 2.8 metres in the bank on the east-southeast side is thought to mark the position of the original entrance. The interior slopes gently eastward and shows traces of two possible structures: one roughly rectangular, one roughly circular, both detectable as subtle surface features rather than standing remains. The ground inside is uneven and clear of vegetation, which is itself suggestive; land long associated with burial, or with the particular unease that often attached to cillíní, tended not to be disturbed by later agricultural use.