Local tradition holds that the rocky rise conceals a souterrain, an underground stone-built tunnel of the kind constructed throughout early medieval Ireland, typically for storage, refuge, or both. The entrance, which once opened on the north-eastern side of the knoll just north of a field wall running east to west, has been blocked up. There are no visible remains. The place keeps its secret completely.

The knoll itself is modest in scale, roughly fifteen metres north to south and ten metres east to west, with a relatively flat top of about eight by six metres. Boulders and stones protrude irregularly around its base, and the whole feature is now heavily overgrown with blackthorn, hawthorn, and brambles. Local memory also attached the name "fort" to the knoll, suggesting that people understood it, at some point, as a place of some significance, perhaps the remains of a ringfort or enclosed settlement. No structural evidence of an enclosure survives above ground, however, and the knoll may simply have accumulated associations over generations without retaining any clear physical trace of them. What remains is a lump of Mayo pasture that carries, in the absence of anything to see, the particular weight of things that have been deliberately put out of reach.