What survives at Pollshone Head is a grass-covered complex of banks, ditches, and enclosures that speaks to layers of occupation and defence, the eastern edge now eaten back by coastal erosion, leaving the site with an open, incomplete quality that makes its original form all the more intriguing to read.

The earthwork consists of two enclosures with distinct shapes and functions. The inner one is roughly subcircular or D-shaped, measuring about 32 metres east to west and 29 metres north to south, and is defined on its surviving sides by scarps between 1.6 and 2 metres high. Around it runs a curving bank with an external fosse, a ditch designed to slow or stop an attacker, and a counterscarp bank beyond that. The outer enclosure to the west is triangular in plan, tapering to an apex where a single fosse cuts across the promontory to seal off the landward approach, a technique suited to promontory forts, which use natural coastal geography as their primary defence. The name "moat" in the local toponym hints at later, possibly medieval, associations, and archaeologists have suggested the inner enclosure may be a rath, a type of enclosed farmstead typical of early medieval Ireland, imposed on top of an even earlier set of defences. That possibility of a site built over a site, reused and reinterpreted across generations, gives Pollshone an archaeological depth that its quietly grassy surface does not immediately advertise.