Sitting in pasture on a gentle south-facing slope in County Cork, the earthwork is barely perceptible from a distance, its enclosing bank rising only twenty centimetres above the interior ground level and forty centimetres above the exterior. A shallow surrounding fosse, a ditch dug to reinforce the bank's defensive or boundary effect, completes the circuit. The whole enclosure measures roughly thirty-two metres across, a modest but typical example of the kind of enclosed farmstead that was once scattered across every townland in Ireland.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths when formed from earthen banks rather than stone, were the dominant settlement type of early medieval Ireland, most commonly associated with the period between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. They functioned primarily as enclosed farmsteads, the bank and fosse marking out a household's territory and offering some protection for livestock. The Dromskehy example was already being recorded cartographically by 1937, when it appeared on an Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a hachured circular raised area with a diameter of approximately thirty metres. What the map could not show, and what makes the site particularly interesting, is the evidence preserved inside the enclosure itself: the remains of cultivation ridges running on a north-south axis across the interior. These ridges suggest that the enclosed space was worked as agricultural ground at some point, either during the fort's active use or in a later period when its original function had been forgotten and the earthwork simply offered a convenient field boundary.