The misclassification is not entirely surprising. By the time cartographers were at work, the site had been planted with trees and absorbed into the ornamental grounds associated with Carrick House, whose avenue ran immediately to the south-south-west of the mound as clearly visible on the 1837 edition of the map. What the surveyors drew was what they saw: a neat circular stand of trees on a rise, not the earthen bank of a ringfort quietly persisting beneath.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is an enclosed circular or oval settlement, typically of early medieval date, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. At Carrick, the roughly circular raised area measures approximately 37.5 metres north to south and 34.5 metres east to west. The defining bank is low and poorly preserved, though it survives best at the southern arc. Notably, its outer face has been rebuilt or reinforced with stone masonry dating to after 1700, the point at which the estate appears to have repurposed the ancient enclosure as a tree-ring feature within its landscape. Slight traces of an external fosse, the ditch that would originally have run around the outside of the bank, are still visible at the northern side. Lough Bane lies roughly 190 metres to the north, and a second ringfort sits only 145 metres to the south-south-west, suggesting this stretch of elevated land carried some significance over a long period. The interior of the enclosure slopes from north to south, a natural unevenness that the later tree planting did little to disguise.