It measures roughly 21 metres across, and what defines it is a levelled bank of earth and stone, about 1.8 metres wide, still faintly raised above the surrounding field. Running around part of its outer edge, from the north-east around through the south to the north-west, are the intermittent traces of a fosse, a shallow external ditch that has been largely filled in over the centuries, surviving in places to a depth of only about 20 centimetres. Whoever once entered this enclosure did so through a gap that has long since disappeared.

This kind of earthwork is broadly classified as a ringfort, the most common archaeological monument type in Ireland, though the term covers a wide range of enclosed sites built and used from the early medieval period onward. Most were farmsteads, places where a family and their livestock sheltered behind a bank and ditch. The combination of a raised interior, a surrounding earthen bank, and an external fosse is characteristic of the form, though at Dalystown the centuries of agricultural use have done their softening work. The bank has been levelled, the ditch has silted and settled, and the entrance, which would typically have faced a favourable direction, perhaps east or south-east, has been completely absorbed into the landscape. What remains is a legible ghost of a structure rather than a monument in any dramatic sense.