The earthwork is small and low, its enclosing bank barely rising above ankle height, yet its proportions are deliberate and its shape almost perfectly round. These qualities are what separate it from a chance irregularity in the field.

The enclosure measures roughly sixteen metres east to west and fifteen and a half metres north to south, making it a compact but clearly defined space. A low bank, standing about thirty centimetres on the interior and slightly less on the outside, traces its perimeter, accompanied by a shallow external fosse, a narrow ditch running around the outer edge of the bank, dug to perhaps fifteen centimetres deep. An entrance gap, just over three metres wide, opens to the east. Enclosures of this general type are scattered across Ireland and are thought to date from the early medieval period in many cases, though without excavation the age of any individual example is difficult to pin down with confidence. They served a variety of purposes, from settlement enclosures associated with ringforts to stock enclosures and ritual or boundary features. This one sits a short distance north of a stream and west of the Awbeg River, the same quiet waterway that flows through the landscape once associated with the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser, who lived and wrote in this part of Cork in the late sixteenth century. Whether the enclosure predates or postdates that period by centuries is unknown, but it belongs to a long sequence of human activity in a valley that has been farmed and settled for a very long time.