A ringfort, or rath, was a farmstead enclosure typically built between roughly 500 and 1000 AD, defined by one or more banks and ditches, and this one preserves its anatomy with unusual clarity. The inner scarp still stands to around 3.5 metres, and beyond it lies a U-shaped fosse, the ditch that ran between the inner and outer defences, measuring some 13 metres wide and 3.5 metres deep. That combination of height and depth gives a real sense of the effort involved in construction and of the social ambition that went with it.

The site is oval rather than the more common circular plan, running approximately 38 metres north to south and 34 metres east to west. At the south-east there is a possible causewayed entrance, a narrow gap of around 4 metres where the fosse was bridged or left uncut to allow access, which would have been the point of most controlled movement in and out of the enclosed space. Beyond the fosse, the outer bank survives with a rounded top, standing about 2 metres on its interior face and a more modest 0.6 metres on the exterior, with a width of roughly 9 metres. One detail that grounds the place firmly in the living landscape rather than the purely archaeological is the evidence of badger activity along the exterior of the inner scarp, with soil and spoil thrown outward into the fosse. The animals have been doing inadvertent excavation of their own, a reminder that these earthworks remain active environments long after their human occupants are gone.