The western arc of the original enclosure has been destroyed, leaving a horseshoe-shaped earthwork open to the hillside, its remaining banks curving around a roughly thirty-metre interior like a cupped hand. A rath, to use the Irish term, is an early medieval farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically housing a single family and their livestock. Most survive as complete or near-complete circles; this one does not, and that incompleteness gives it a quietly different character from the thousands of better-preserved examples scattered across the Irish countryside.

The site sits on a slight natural terrace in the hills on the western side of the River Nore valley, in rolling grassland where the land rises steeply to the west and drops away to the east. The original enclosure measured around thirty metres in internal diameter, rimmed by an earthen bank roughly three metres wide and modest in height, standing about four-tenths of a metre on both the interior and exterior faces. These are not dramatic dimensions, and the bank was never a towering barrier; its purpose was as much to define a boundary and signal occupation as to provide serious defence. What it does provide, even now, is a strong sense of why someone chose this particular shelf of ground. The views run north and south along the Nore valley and east across it, offering the kind of long-sightedness that early farmers and their communities would have valued highly.