A ringfort, the most common type of early medieval enclosure in Ireland, typically a roughly circular area defined by an earthen bank and ditch, this one sits on a slight rise in flat Galway grassland and measures just under thirty metres across. The enclosing element is now reduced to a scarp, a low slope in the ground rather than any upstanding bank, and across the northern to eastern arc even that has been largely obliterated. The cause of its destruction was a house, which has since fallen into ruin itself.

The layering here is worth pausing over. Ordnance Survey maps record that something identified as Lisheennora Castle once stood within the interior of the fort, meaning a later medieval structure was planted inside an older one, a fairly common pattern in Ireland where earlier enclosures were reused or built upon across the centuries. Both are now gone in any meaningful sense, leaving a faint earthwork in a field as the only sign that this corner of County Galway held, at different points in time, an early enclosure and then a building substantial enough to be called a castle on a nineteenth-century map. The ruined house that subsequently erased much of the fort's northern arc adds a third layer of occupation and abandonment, each phase having diminished the one before it.