The difficulty is that nobody knows exactly where, and the structure itself has left no visible trace.

According to Fahey, writing in 1893, the site was associated with King Guaire, a Connacht king who ruled in the seventh century and whose stronghold was recorded under the name 'Gort insi Guaire', meaning roughly the field or enclosure of Guaire's island. A ringfort, in its most common form, is a roughly circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or occasionally as the seat of a local lord or king. Whether Guaire's 'palace' took that form here, or something else entirely, is unknown; no physical details of its layout or dimensions survive. What is recorded is that an eighteenth-century military barracks was subsequently built over the site, effectively sealing or destroying whatever earthworks may have remained. The precise location of the original structure has never been established, and the coordinates assigned to it are understood to be approximate at best.

The result is a site that exists almost entirely as a historical notation rather than a physical place. The barracks occupy the island today, and the early medieval landscape beneath it remains, for now, a matter of inference and a single nineteenth-century reference.