The earthwork, measuring roughly 41 metres east to west and 31 metres from north-north-east to south-south-west, is enclosed by a low bank and a shallow external fosse, which is simply a ditch cut around the outside of the bank. Its interior climbs gently toward the centre, and faint cultivation ridges run east to west across it. Most unusually, there is no trace of an entrance anywhere along its circuit.

That absence of an entrance is what makes the site genuinely difficult to classify. A ringfort, the most common type of enclosed earthwork in Ireland, typically protected a farmstead and required a way in and out. Here, the combination of the enclosed bank, the wet marshy setting, and the lack of any entrance opening led researchers to conclude that this is almost certainly not a ringfort at all. The siting and the form of the earthwork instead suggest it may be a barrow, a term covering a broad range of prehistoric burial mounds, usually earthen and often circular or oval, raised over the dead. The monument was already partially levelled when it was first formally described in 1977, so its full original profile can only be guessed at. The cultivation ridges running across the interior suggest the ground has seen agricultural disturbance at some point, which may account for some of that lost height.