Whether the name refers to wildcats, a family nickname, or something stranger altogether is not recorded, but the title has outlasted whatever explanation once made it obvious.

The site is a univallate rath, meaning a ringfort enclosed by a single earthen bank and ditch, the most common form of early medieval farmstead in Ireland. Thousands were built across the country between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, typically housing a single farming family and their livestock. This particular example sits in the corner of a field in Rathmorrel, County Kerry, in the north of the peninsula. Its western side has been cut into by a fieldbank, the kind of slow agricultural erosion that has altered or erased countless similar sites across the country. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, recorded the fort as heavily overgrown and effectively inaccessible at the time of survey, a condition that is not unusual for ringforts left at the margins of working farmland.