The site is recorded as a fort, a category that in the Irish archaeological landscape typically refers to a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval enclosure in the country. Ringforts, known variously as raths or cashels depending on whether they were built from earthen banks or stone, served as farmsteads and defended settlements, and tens of thousands of them once dotted the Irish countryside. What makes Gubnahardin worth noting is precisely how little is currently known about it in any accessible form.

The townland name An Chloich Mhóir translates from Irish as "the big stone," which may or may not point to some feature of the landscape that once made the area distinctive, a large glacial erratic, perhaps, or a prominent outcrop that oriented the people who named it. Mayo's terrain, shaped heavily by Atlantic weather and the legacy of glaciation, is full of such markers, stones and hills and water features that became fixed points in an oral and then written geography. The fort itself sits within this landscape as a named, recorded monument, its presence acknowledged even if its details remain, for now, largely unexamined in publicly available sources.