It is the kind of feature easy to miss entirely if you do not know to look, and easier still to misread if you do. Locally, the site is known as An Dún, meaning the fort, a name that suggests an enclosed settlement of some kind once stood here, though what the ground gives away most readily is not a wall or an earthwork but a souterrain: an underground stone-lined tunnel, typically associated with early medieval ringforts and used for storage, refuge, or both.

The detail about the souterrain comes from the writer and Irish-language scholar known as An Seabhac, the pen name of Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha, who noted in 1939 that a passage led from the interior of the site outward into an adjacent field. An Seabhac was a careful recorder of local tradition and landscape on the Corca Dhuibhne peninsula, and his observation places this feature in a long lineage of such tunnels found across Kerry and the wider west of Ireland. The association with a dún, a defended enclosure, is consistent with the pattern elsewhere: souterrains were commonly built within or beneath ringforts, their exits sometimes emerging well beyond the enclosure's banks, perhaps as a means of escape during attack or simply as ventilated cold-storage for dairy produce.