No surface trace has ever confirmed it, and yet the story persists. That kind of unverifiable rumour, stubbornly local and quietly compelling, tends to attach itself to places that already have an air of concealment about them.

The fort at Lacka is a univallate rath, meaning it has a single enclosing bank rather than the multiple concentric rings found at more elaborate sites. The bank, roughly four metres wide at its base, rises to about 1.6 metres on the outside and a more modest one metre on the interior face, enclosing a sub-circular area of around 23 metres across. What lifts this example slightly out of the ordinary is the stone facing visible in sections of the bank, a detail that suggests rather more structural ambition than a purely earthen mound would imply. Raths were typically the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, used between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, and their interiors were often raised above the surrounding ground level, as is the case here, where the interior slopes gently southward. The souterrain mentioned in the local tradition, an underground passage or chamber of the kind commonly associated with Irish ringforts and used variously for storage or refuge, lies in the fort to the immediate north. Whether there was ever a physical link between the two sites remains an open question, and one that the ground has so far declined to answer.

The site sits in the Lacka townland of north County Kerry, a landscape documented in Catherine Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which remains one of the more thorough regional surveys of its kind in Ireland.