Within a radius of roughly 300 metres, two further ringforts sit to the west and east respectively, making this one node in a remarkably dense local grouping. The monument itself is modest in scale, an oval enclosure of around 22 metres in diameter, yet its survival in reclaimed flat pasture, where agricultural improvement has levelled so much of the surrounding landscape, gives it a particular interest.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is an early medieval enclosed settlement, typically circular or oval, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches and used as a farmstead or place of residence. This example in the townland of Rathcannon sits 365 metres northeast of the Morningstar River, which marks the boundary between Rathcannon and the neighbouring townland of Coolboy. When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1840 for their six-inch series, they noted it as one of ten ancient forts recorded in the northern part of the townland, a detail preserved in the Ordnance Survey Name Books covering the Abbeyfeale to Bruree district. At that point the monument appeared as an oval scarp, already cut across at its southeastern side by a field boundary that post-dates 1700. By the time the twenty-five-inch revision was completed in 1897, surveyors described a sunken oval enclosed by a bank, suggesting some ongoing erosion or settling of the earthworks across the intervening decades.

The site lies in low-lying agricultural ground, and its most obvious feature today is the tree cover that has established itself over the earthwork, making it visible on aerial orthophotographs taken between 2005 and 2012. That canopy of trees is often the first sign a visitor will notice when approaching across the flat pasture, a small raised thicket standing slightly apart from the managed fields around it. The post-1700 field boundary still cuts across the southeastern portion, which means the full oval form is no longer entirely legible at ground level. Patience and a slow circuit of the perimeter will reveal more of the surviving bank than a single approach from any one direction.