The earthwork reads today as a roughly sub-triangular enclosure, its straight sides formed not by ancient construction but by field fences that have gradually replaced the original boundary. Only the curving bank running from west-south-west around to the east retains something of the monument's earlier character, and even that tells a partial story.

A ringfort, or rath, is one of the most common early medieval monument types in Ireland, typically a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or place of enclosure roughly between the sixth and twelfth centuries. This particular example sits on a north-east facing slope of a slight rise in grassland in County Westmeath, with open views to the north and north-west. By 1837, when the Ordnance Survey recorded it on their Fair Plan map, the enclosure was already being depicted as D-shaped and annotated simply as "fort", suggesting the transformation from its original circular form was well under way by that point. The full dimensions are considerable, running approximately 48 metres north-west to south-east and 51 metres north-east to south-west, which gives a sense of the scale of what was once here. The clearest evidence of what the monument originally looked like now comes not from walking the ground but from above: aerial photography using Digital Globe imagery has revealed cropmarks indicating where the levelled portions of the enclosing bank once ran, the buried soil structure still influencing how grass grows above it centuries later.