The monument is oval in plan, roughly 41 metres by 43 metres across its raised interior platform, and is wrapped in a complex arrangement of banks and ditches that suggests a more elaborate construction than the average Irish ringfort. A rath is an earthen enclosure, typically circular or oval, built during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead; but the elevated platform here, combined with its multivallate layout, meaning it has multiple concentric banks and fosses rather than just one, has led to uncertainty about what this structure actually is.

When the site was formally described in 1970, surveyors noted a high, steep earthen bank enclosing an almost level raised interior, with a shallow outer fosse (a defensive ditch), a slight counterscarp bank of earth and stones beyond that, and then a further annular space, a ring-shaped zone, bounded by yet another bank and external ditch. A slight radial bank crosses this annular space at the south, and no original entrance could be identified, though a disturbance gap cuts through the outer scarp at the north. The 1913 edition of the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map recorded the whole earthwork at approximately 80 metres by 70 metres overall. The notably high platform at the centre is the detail that complicates any straightforward classification: it could indicate a raised rath or platform ringfort, a less common variant of the early medieval enclosure type, or it could point instead to an Anglo-Norman motte castle, a form of fortification introduced to Ireland after the twelfth-century invasion, in which a large mound of earth was thrown up to carry a timber tower. The two monument types can be difficult to distinguish without excavation, and this site has not resolved the question.