The site is recorded as an enclosure, but the ground tells a more layered story: a wide, deep fosse, a type of defensive ditch, runs around a roughly circular area some 26 metres across, and within that ditch are the intermittent traces of not one but possibly two collapsed walls. Whether these represent the remains of an inner and outer cashel wall, a cashel being a stone-built ringfort typical of early medieval Ireland, or simply stone-faced earthen banks, is genuinely uncertain. Too little survives intact to say with confidence. And near the centre, a spread of undulating overgrown rubble is said locally to be all that remains of an old manor house, a detail which, if accurate, means the site was reoccupied or built upon long after whatever first prompted the construction of that encircling ditch.

The monument appears by name on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from 1840 and again in the 1916 edition, hachured and labelled as Knockaunacurra Fort. The 1840 map goes further, depicting a building within the eastern part of the interior, which aligns with the local tradition about the manor house. If the outer wall or bank originally completed a full circuit around the fosse, the whole monument would have measured approximately 40 metres north to south, a substantial presence on the hilltop. The interior today is marshy and slopes away to the north, which makes reading the earthworks on the ground more difficult than the maps might suggest.