The site, known in Irish as Lios na nGallán, was levelled in the early 1980s, and not a ridge or hollow survives to suggest that one of Kerry's more elaborate early medieval ringforts once occupied this ground. What makes the loss particularly sharp is how substantial the place once was: a trivallate rath, meaning a ringfort defended by three concentric banks and ditches rather than the more common single or double circuit, commanding distant views in every direction from its position in Shanacloon.

The dimensions recorded before the destruction give a sense of the original scale. The innermost enclosure had a diameter of around 100 feet, and the system of banks and fosses, the ditches cut between them, extended outward in carefully engineered rings. The inner fosse alone was nearly 11 feet deep, the middle bank 15 feet wide. Beneath all of this lay a souterrain, an underground stone-built passage, of the kind commonly associated with early Irish settlement sites and thought to have served for storage or concealment. A researcher named Cooke investigated and described the souterrain in 1906. He found three stone-lined passages connected by two low creepways, each creepway barely two feet high and less than eighteen inches wide, formed of upright jamb stones and a single lintel. The passages themselves ranged between roughly ten and fourteen feet in length, their walls corbelled slightly inward beneath a roof of flat lintels. One entrance lay in the south-western sector of the innermost bank; a second opening was discovered during digging in the interior. The whole underground system was compact and deliberate, the kind of construction that takes considerable effort to build and considerable nerve to enter.

Cooke's 1906 account is now the primary record for a site that otherwise exists only on old Ordnance Survey maps, marked across both the first and second editions before the earthworks were finally removed.