What they would be missing is a coastal promontory fort, an oval plateau raised roughly three metres above the surrounding ground, its perimeter defined partly by natural cliff and partly by the collapsed remains of a drystone wall that has long since slumped into a grassed-over bank. The interior is flat and featureless. There is no visible entrance causeway. To the southeast, a shallow fosse, a defensive ditch cut to reinforce a fortification's outer edge, runs for about five metres before disappearing into a scarp. Nothing announces itself. The place simply sits, looking out across the water towards Inishturk and the islands scattered along the Connemara coast.

The wall itself, though much reduced, repays closer attention. Along the northern cliff edge it survives to a readable height, showing a 0.6-metre inner face of rough, uncoursed drystone masonry. At one point a standing slab, visible only in the cliff section, indicates that the wall once had an outer revetment as well, meaning it was faced on both sides, a degree of construction effort that suggests this was not a casual enclosure. The overall wall thickness runs to five metres. What it was for, and when it was built, remains open. Promontory forts are a broad and not fully understood category in Irish archaeology; some are Iron Age, some later, and many have resisted precise dating. The interior of this one offers no obvious clues, but the cliff face does yield something else: several distinct layers of limpet shells and winkles sitting just below the present ground surface, almost certainly the remnants of a midden, the accumulated food debris of people who lived or sheltered here and ate what the shore provided. Beneath the shell layers lie deposits of quartz and shale pebbles whose origins, natural or otherwise, have not been resolved. The shore, notably, can still be reached directly from within the enclosure.