What makes the spot quietly puzzling is not simply its age or obscurity, but the combination of things that appear to occupy the same ground: a possible moated site, which is a type of medieval enclosure typically consisting of a flat-topped island surrounded by a water-filled ditch, and within it the remains of several small stone rooms whose origins seem to reach back even further.

The buildings were described in some detail by a writer named Moore, working in the period 1849 to 1851, who called the whole complex a quadrangular fort. He noted that it possessed the usual fosse and rampart, the fosse being the external ditch that accompanied such earthwork enclosures, and that inside he could make out foundations laid out in small cells, roughly half a dozen in total. The masonry, he thought, was of an antiquity equal to that of the earthen defences surrounding it, suggesting that whoever raised the stone walls and whoever threw up the earthworks were either the same people or at least contemporaries. Whether the site represents a fortified medieval homestead, a monastic precinct, or something else entirely is a question the available evidence has not settled. When the site was examined again in 2016, the vegetation had so thoroughly covered everything that none of the internal features Moore had observed could be identified at all.