It is, in fact, a ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that was the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from somewhere between the sixth and twelfth centuries. Most of the Irish landscape still holds thousands of these features, yet each one has its own particular character in the ground.

This example is what archaeologists classify as univallate, meaning it has a single enclosing bank rather than two or three concentric ones. The bank itself is substantial: 4.1 metres wide at its base, rising nearly two metres on the outer face, though it presents a much lower profile on the interior side, somewhere between 0.6 and 1.1 metres above the enclosed ground. That asymmetry is typical of the form and reflects how the material was piled up from the digging of the fosse, the external ditch that runs around the outside of the bank from the north-west, continuing through north and east to the south-east. The fosse here is shallow, U-shaped in cross-section, and modest in scale, between 1.2 and 2.4 metres wide and roughly 0.4 metres deep. The interior measures about 36 metres north to south and 32 metres east to west, a generous enclosure that would have sheltered a farmhouse, outbuildings, and livestock belonging to a family of some local standing. The C. Toal survey of north Kerry, published in 1995, recorded and described the site in detail.