What makes them quietly puzzling is that even the basic question of how many there are has never been fully settled. Are there four, or five?

The structures are sub-rectangular or D-shaped in plan, the D-shape being a common form in early Irish enclosures where a straight wall forms one side and a curved wall the other, often reflecting their attachment to a larger fortification. Judith Cuppage, writing in 1986 as part of the Archaeological Survey of the Dingle Peninsula, recorded four or five of them hugging the inner face of the fort wall, surviving as sunken, rubble-lined depressions. The largest measures roughly 2.25 metres by 1.6 metres internally and reaches about 1.2 metres in depth. A further D-shaped foundation sits outside the wall, just north of the southern entrance, measuring approximately 2 metres by 2.75 metres, with surviving walling up to 0.4 metres high. A large depression to the south of the same entrance may, Cuppage cautiously suggested, be nothing more ancient than a relatively recent sheep-shelter. Her published figure showed only four structures, yet a plan drawn by P.J. Lynch in an 1899 article on the fort clearly depicts a fifth, positioned to the south of the southern entrance and abutting the outside of the promontory wall. The discrepancy between the two accounts has never been fully resolved, leaving the tally uncertain by at least one structure across more than a century of observation.