To the casual eye it might read as natural coastal disorder, but the arrangement is deliberate, or was once. A promontory fort uses the natural defence of cliffs and shore to minimise the amount of artificial walling needed, with the sea itself doing much of the work on the exposed sides. Here the shore closes off the northern and western edges, while the line of collapsed stonework runs along the south and east, roughly following a shallow creek.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited in 1914 and recorded what he interpreted as the remains of an overthrown wall, estimating it had originally stood some eight to ten feet thick. That is a substantial barrier, comparable to the defensive enclosures found at other coastal fort sites along the south-west Irish coast, and it implies something more formally constructed than the present scatter of stones suggests. The interior is overlooked by a ridge immediately to the south, which would have been a tactical weakness rather than a strength, though whether the fort's builders considered this a problem or simply accepted the terrain as they found it is impossible to say. What makes the site stranger still is the proximity of a wedge tomb, a Neolithic or Early Bronze Age megalithic burial monument, sitting just outside the stone tumble to the east. The two structures belong to entirely different periods, separated by perhaps two thousand years, and yet they occupy almost the same ground, as if successive communities recognised something useful, or significant, in this particular corner of the island's western shore.