What appears at first to be a straightforward Norman motte, a type of earthen castle mound on which a timber or stone tower would once have stood, turns out to be the centrepiece of a sprawling complex of enclosures, banks, scarps, and fosses that spread southwards and south-westwards across the low-lying fields. Fragments of mortared masonry are still visible in the motte's side, hinting at something more substantial that once stood here, and a triangular parcel of ground to the west is known locally as a churchyard, a detail that quietly suggests this landscape carried significance well beyond military occupation.

A survey carried out in 1971 recorded the motte as a high, steep, almost flat-topped earthen mound, with no recognisable trace of a bailey, the defended enclosure that typically accompanies a motte in a motte-and-bailey castle arrangement. A follow-up inspection in 1978, however, found evidence that the picture was more involved. Banks along the northern and western edges of a nearby quarry were interpreted as possible traces of that missing bailey. Further south, a sub-oval enclosure bounded by a low bank sat on slightly raised ground to the south-west, its interior divided by a further bank running north-west to south-east. Beyond it, a large roughly circular enclosure occupied lower ground to the south-east, its boundary formed by a very low earthen bank and a shallow fosse, a defensive ditch, running along its northern, north-western, and southern edges. Low banks connected these features to one another and to the motte, and old cultivation ridges crossed the entire area, adding yet another layer of human use to the site.

The long grass that covered the site at the time of the 1978 survey made close inspection difficult, and the overlapping earthworks, some potentially medieval, some possibly reflecting much older use, remain a challenge to read on the ground. The locally remembered name of churchyard for the western earthwork is one of those details that tends to outlast the documents, carrying a faint memory of function that formal survey cannot always recover.