The enclosure measures roughly 42 metres north to south and 27 metres east to west, dimensions consistent with the kind of compact ringfort, or rath, that once served as a defended farmstead in early medieval Ireland. A rath typically comprised a raised circular or sub-circular area enclosed by an earthen bank and outer ditch, called a fosse, though this example is notably rectangular rather than round. What makes its situation particularly interesting is less the earthwork itself than its relationship to the ground around it: field boundaries mapped in 1839 run east to west up to both sides of the enclosure but stop short of crossing it, suggesting that even then, agricultural activity recognised something worth skirting around.

Sitting just a few metres to the north-west of the enclosure's corner is St. Dallan's Well, marked on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, with a small pool and a stream feeding northward into a larger watercourse. Holy wells in Ireland were typically associated with early Christian saints and remained focal points for local devotion long after the formal church had moved elsewhere. Writing in 1905, the historian Carrigan noted that the old stone basin of the well was still intact at that time, and placed it, with a slight error of direction, beside the fosse of what he called a small square rath. His description is one of the few direct references to the earthwork surviving in print, and it confirms that the feature was still legible on the ground at the turn of the twentieth century.

By the time of the 1947 Ordnance Survey revision, only the northern portion of the enclosure was still being mapped, outlined now by water channels rather than any surviving bank, while the field boundary that had once stopped at its edge was shown running straight through. Satellite imagery from August 2015 caught the southern portion showing as a cropmark, the kind of ghost outline that appears in dry summers when buried features affect how grass or grain grows above them. The northern section was scrub at that point, but imagery from May 2020 shows even that cleared and absorbed back into the working farmland.