Whether it ever truly functioned as one is another matter. The site at Tullig is classified as a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which typically describes a circular or oval enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period. What survives here, though, is something murkier: a roughly semi-circular mound rising about a metre above the surrounding land, densely overgrown, with no clear trace of the enclosing bank or wall that would normally define the type. The stony surface of the platform is thought to result from field clearance, with generations of farmers simply piling stones onto a convenient raised area rather than scattering them across workable ground.

The site carries a second layer of local significance that has nothing to do with farming or fortification. It was reputedly used for the burial of unbaptised infants, a practice that places it within a widespread tradition across rural Ireland. Children who died before baptism were considered, under older theological teaching, to be excluded from consecrated ground, and so communities found their own informal places for interment, often at the margins of fields, beneath thresholds, or at ancient earthworks already freighted with a sense of otherness. These sites, sometimes called cillíní or ceallúnaigh, appear throughout the Irish landscape, often attached to pre-Christian monuments whose ambiguous status seemed to make them appropriate for those who fell outside the formal structures of the Church. The association at Tullig follows that pattern precisely, a place already set apart by its slight elevation and uncertain origins, made to carry an additional, quieter kind of grief.

The site was documented as part of the Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey published by J. Cuppage in 1986, which catalogued monuments across the Corca Dhuibhne region. By that point the remains were already heavily overgrown, and there is no suggestion that any excavation has taken place. What a visitor would find today is less a monument than an absence: a slight rise in a flat coastal field, its stony surface hidden under vegetation, its history held almost entirely in local memory rather than in any visible structure.