The very word conjures a round enclosure, a farmstead ringed by an earthen bank, the standard unit of early medieval rural life across Ireland. What makes the remains at Fanahy quietly puzzling is that they do not fit that pattern at all. What survives here, in a stretch of level boggy grassland interrupted by rock outcrop, points instead towards something rectangular, which opens up a different set of possibilities entirely.

The physical evidence is fragmentary but legible. Two straight, unconnected sections of bank survive on the northern side of a field boundary. The larger of the two stands roughly a metre high and runs northeast to southwest for about twenty-seven metres; the second, slightly lower at around seventy centimetres, runs northward from the field boundary for eight metres, positioned some seventeen and a half metres to the east of the first. To the south of the field boundary, in ground that has since been reclaimed for agriculture, there is nothing visible at the surface. Taken together, the surviving banks are considered consistent with either a rectangular enclosure or a moated site. A moated site, for context, is a medieval farmstead or manor surrounded by a water-filled or wet ditch, a form more common in areas of Anglo-Norman settlement than in the older Gaelic tradition of circular raths. That ambiguity, circular rath or medieval moated enclosure, is part of what makes the site interesting. Locally, the place has been remembered as the site of a "lios", the Irish term for a fairy fort or enclosed settlement, which suggests the spot retained some significance in local memory long after whatever stood here had largely disappeared into the bog.