The 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the site marked as a polygonal grove of trees, barely distinguishable from the shoreline, which gives some sense of how dramatically the landscape has shifted since then. What survives today is a large D-shaped raised platform, roughly 60 metres north to south and 80 metres east to west, enclosed by a well-preserved earthen bank, a deep V-shaped fosse (the defensive ditch cut around the outer edge), and a second outer bank that remains visible only from the south-west and west. An entrance gap and causeway survive at the eastern side, and the interior, which slopes gently from north to south, has been planted with trees.

The form of the monument is unusual enough to sit somewhere between two recognised categories. A ringfort, or rath, was the typical enclosed farmstead of early medieval Ireland, built from earthen banks rather than stone, and often associated with a single farming family or local lord. But the position of this one, pressed against the former lakeshore and using the water as a natural defensive boundary along its straight southern edge, suggests it may have functioned as an inland promontory fort, a type that exploits a natural feature of terrain in place of a full circuit of earthworks. Scholarly opinion, drawing on research by O'Sullivan and others, has suggested the site may have been a royal enclosure associated with the Uí Fiachrach Cúile Fobhair, a dynasty whose territory lay in this part of the midlands. A crannog, the artificial island platform used as a dwelling in early medieval Ireland, lies just 160 metres to the south, which adds weight to the idea that this part of Lough Derravaragh's northern shore was a place of some significance. The proximity of both monuments, the lakeside rath and the crannog, hints at a cluster of high-status activity that made deliberate use of the water.