Look more carefully at the ground, however, and something older begins to surface. A low curving scarp, between three-quarters of a metre and a full metre high, sweeps around the southern side of a raised platform, while the surviving field walls to the north follow a distinctly convex curve. Together, these features outline a roughly circular enclosure about fourteen metres across, and a shallow circular depression some five and a half metres in diameter sits in the north-western sector, possibly the ghost of a clochán, a small dry-stone hut of the kind associated with early medieval settlement in the west of Ireland.

The site sits on a narrow strip of cultivated ground between the foothills of the Brandon mountain range to the north-west and the peat bog of the Owenmore valley floor to the south-east, a slender corridor of workable land in otherwise demanding terrain. A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, typically circular and associated with early medieval farmsteads, and the remains here are consistent with that form, though faint enough that archaeologists have been cautious about definitive classification. Traces of a grass-grown wall survive along the south-western perimeter, adding to the picture without quite completing it. The site was recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, which catalogued the extraordinary density of early monuments across Corca Dhuibhne, and the ambiguity noted then has not since been resolved.

What gives the place its particular quality is precisely that uncertainty. The rectangular sheep-fold marked on the maps is a practical overlay on top of something much earlier, the later farmers apparently borrowing whatever structural logic the old enclosure still offered. The north-eastern wall has since been removed, which has both opened up the form and complicated any reading of it. What remains is a landscape feature that asks to be looked at twice, a platform and a scarp and a curve that do not quite add up to a sheep-fold.