The enclosure, roughly thirty metres across, has been quarried, levelled, and in places apparently burned, leaving only a low, broad bank of earth and stone that barely rises above the surrounding pastureland. On the eastern side, the bank has been removed entirely. What remains is the faint ghost of a boundary that once meant something to the people who built it, now legible mainly as a slight thickening of the ground.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when defined primarily by earthen banks rather than stone, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from around the sixth to the twelfth centuries. They served as farmsteads for individual families, the enclosing bank offering a degree of protection for people and livestock rather than any serious military fortification. The Summerhill example is roughly circular, measuring 30.5 metres east to west, with a bank that stands less than a metre high even at its best-preserved points. The interior has been disturbed by land clearance, with low heaps of earth scattered around the circumference suggesting deliberate attempts to level the site for agricultural use. The original entrance could not be confirmed from the surviving evidence, though a 1984 survey of the Ikerrin district, a historical barony in north Tipperary, identified a possible gap in the north-east sector that may mark where people once passed in and out. There is no external fosse, the defensive ditch that often accompanies earthworks of this kind, either because one was never dug or because it too has been lost.

The site occupies a gentle north-east-facing slope that looks out over a small river valley or ravine to the north-west, set within undulating pastureland. The position is typical of ringfort placement in Ireland, where slight elevation and proximity to water were practical considerations rather than purely defensive ones. Even in its diminished condition, the relationship between the earthwork and its landscape is still perceptible.