A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and was the most common form of rural settlement in Ireland from around the fifth to the twelfth century. Thousands survive across the country; thousands more do not.

This one still appeared on the 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map as a roughly oval earthwork, its perimeter planted with trees and annotated simply as "fort". By 1980, when surveyors recorded it in detail, the structure was already poorly preserved. What remained was a circular area of approximately 26 metres across, enclosed by a low earth and stone bank some 4.7 metres wide and just 0.4 metres high, with a shallow external fosse, the term for the ditch that typically ran outside the enclosing bank. Even then, the bank survived only along the south-eastern to southern arc, reduced elsewhere to little more than a scarp, a slight fall in the ground where the bank had once stood. The interior slopes gently down toward the north-north-east, toward Ballynafid Lake, which lies 180 metres away. A second ringfort sits 80 metres to the north-north-west, suggesting this was once a landscape with more than one enclosed settlement in close proximity.

Today the modern road that bisects the site means there is little to see at ground level, and what survives of the bank is fragmentary. The lake view to the north-west, however, gives some sense of why this particular ridge was chosen as a place to live.