Most were built roughly between the fifth and tenth centuries, serving as defended homesteads for farming families of some local standing. The one at Lackendarragh is roughly circular, measuring about thirty metres across, and sits on a south-west-facing slope where the interior ground still tilts gently downward toward the west-south-west, just as it always has.

By the time Bowman recorded this site in 1934, it was already showing the effects of centuries of agricultural use. He noted a double-ramparted fort with a saucer-shaped interior raised about four feet above the surrounding field level, and an outer rampart that once stood around seven feet high. Even then, roughly a sixth of that outer rampart had been levelled. What survives today is considerably more subdued. The outer bank has been absorbed into the field boundary system along the north-north-east to east-south-east arc, where it still stands to an internal height of around 1.2 metres. To the north and south it flattens to a barely perceptible rise. Between the banks, a grass-covered fosse, the ditch that would have added to the defensive profile of the ramparts, remains visible, and an external fosse up to half a metre deep persists to the east and south. It is, in other words, a site that requires some patience and a certain willingness to read the ground carefully rather than take it at face value.