It is a rectangular raised platform, ringed by a ditch and fitted with traces of bastions at each corner, the whole arrangement shaped to resemble an artillery battery, the kind of fortified emplacement from which cannon would be fired. But there was never any cannon. When the antiquarian John O'Donovan examined the site in the nineteenth century and recorded his findings in the Ordnance Survey Name Books, he noted a flagstaff on the mound and nothing more in the way of armaments. It was, he concluded, an ornamental construction, a piece of landscaping designed to evoke a military fortification rather than function as one.

The earthwork appears on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it is simply annotated "Battery", measuring approximately 27 metres east to west and 24 metres north to south. It was dropped from the revised editions that followed, which is perhaps fitting for something that never quite committed to being real. It sits on the demesne of Castle Daly, now known as Kilcleagh Park, with a corn mill and castle lying roughly 185 metres to the east-northeast. The earthwork overlooks the old road running east to west past the estate, which raises an obvious question about its purpose: whether it was meant to impress travellers on that road, to give the demesne a certain martial gravity from a distance, remains unclear. There is a separate possibility, not ruled out, that it preserves the remains of an actual seventeenth-century star-shaped earthen fort, a form of defensive fieldwork common in that period, before later hands reshaped it into a garden curiosity.

By 1977, when the platform was described in some detail, it measured roughly 17 metres by 17 metres, noticeably smaller than the dimensions recorded in 1837, and the western side was already better preserved than the eastern. Cattle had grazed across much of the surface and bushes had taken hold along the edges. The earthwork remains visible today, partially tree-lined, legible from aerial photography as a quiet rectangular anomaly in the landscape, a fortification that may never have fortified anything, or may have guarded something entirely forgotten.