It is classified as a ringfort, a rath, the kind of circular earthwork enclosure built across Ireland from the early medieval period as a defended farmstead. Yet what survives above ground amounts to little more than a faint rise in a tillage field, a shadow of a bank that only really betrays itself from the air, where aerial photography has captured it as a soilmark, a ghostly outline left in the earth long after the physical structure was levelled flat.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the enclosure as a hachured square, roughly 25 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, sitting atop a rise on a south-south-west-facing slope. That square outline is itself a small puzzle. Ringforts are, as the name suggests, typically circular, and the square or rectangular form mapped here placed this site in T. B. Barry's 1981 survey of moated sites in County Cork, compiled from cartographic evidence. A moated site, in the medieval Irish context, was usually a raised platform surrounded by a water-filled ditch, associated with Anglo-Norman settlement rather than earlier Gaelic occupation. Whether the square outline on the nineteenth-century map reflects a genuine medieval moat or simply the cartographer's approximation of an irregular earthwork is now difficult to judge. What aerial photography later confirmed is a circular enclosed area of around 26 metres east to west, consistent with a rath rather than a moated platform, though the two classifications have not been fully reconciled for this site.

The enclosure sits in agricultural land and has been substantially levelled by ploughing over the years, which accounts for both the difficulty of reading it on the ground and the clarity with which the soilmark shows up from above. The faint bank outline is still visible to an attentive eye, but this is a site better understood in the context of what once was than what currently remains.