Classified as a ringfort in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, it was already being mapped as far back as the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch edition, and again in the 1920 edition, marked with hachures, the short radiating lines surveyors used to indicate an earthen bank or slope. What surveyors recorded then is still visible today: an enclosure roughly 28 metres east to west and 23 metres north to south, defined by a broad, round-topped earthen bank somewhere between six and a half and nine metres wide.

The ambiguity deepens at the centre. A low subcircular rise, only about ten centimetres high and three metres across, sits in the interior, and it was this feature that caught the attention of the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp when he visited in 1905. Westropp, who documented many earthworks and monuments across Munster in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, noted in that year that the rise might represent a burial mound, and that its top had already been deeply excavated by the time he recorded it. A ringfort, broadly speaking, was an enclosed farmstead of early medieval date, typically defined by one or more earthen banks; a burial mound within such an enclosure would suggest the site either had an earlier funerary function or that successive uses accumulated over time. The excavation Westropp mentioned means that whatever the rise once contained, the evidence may be long gone. Adding to the layered feel of the site, Killilagh graveyard lies immediately to the north-east, and a modern water trough has been set into the southern bank, with a drystone wall following the eastern edge.