Look more carefully, though, and the ground in the western part of the enclosure betrays itself: a raised platform with a depression sunk into it, and a second hollow a little to the north-west, both suggesting that something beneath the surface has given way. The 1841 to 1842 Ordnance Survey map marked the spot with the word "Cave", which is as good a clue as any that the earth here has a hollow history.

The site is a cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort built primarily from stone rather than earth and timber. The enclosing bank, now covered over with grass, still stands up to 0.9 metres above the interior and 1.4 metres above the ground outside, with a possible entrance gap about 2.6 metres wide facing north. The internal space measures roughly 28 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, making it a reasonably substantial enclosure. The two depressions in the western sector are thought to represent the collapsed chambers of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically built beneath early medieval ringforts for storage or refuge. A souterrain's roof, once the supporting structure deteriorates, tends to drop inward over centuries, leaving exactly the kind of bowl-shaped hollows visible here. The detail was recorded in C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which drew on fieldwork carried out across the region.