It forms part of the defensive logic of an early medieval ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically built between roughly 500 and 1000 AD, where the natural landscape was incorporated directly into the structure's design. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is its complexity: rather than a single enclosing bank, it is bivallate, meaning it has two concentric circuits of earthworks, a feature associated with higher-status sites and suggesting that whoever lived here warranted, or at least wanted to project, a degree of social prestige.

The site consists of an oval interior measuring approximately 35 metres north-east to south-west and 31 metres north-west to south-east. Around it runs an earth and stone bank, itself between two and three metres wide and still standing up to 1.2 metres high in places. Beyond that lies an outer fosse, a defensive ditch roughly 3.2 to 3.5 metres wide, visible along the western and northern arcs. A berm, the flat strip of ground left between a ditch and an outer bank, separates this from a second bank along the same stretch. To the south, the builders appear to have dispensed with some of this earthwork infrastructure altogether, relying instead on a sharp natural drop down to the stream below. At the east, a gap roughly two metres wide may represent the fort's original entrance. Attached to that same eastern side is a triangular annexe of considerable size, measuring some 70 metres by 40 metres, bounded to the north by a continuation of the outer bank and to the south, again, by the stream. Annexes of this kind were often used for livestock, adding a practical agricultural dimension to what might otherwise read as a purely defensive structure.