The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a circular enclosure here, roughly 65 metres in diameter. What survives today is a D-shaped field, measuring around 54 metres north to south, bounded by a modern field bank, and inside that bank runs a shallow fosse, a ditch-like depression about three metres wide, curving from the south-southeast around through west to north. The original circle has been interrupted or absorbed by later agricultural boundaries, and what remains offers no straightforward answers.

Archaeologists have not settled on what this structure originally was, and the uncertainty is itself instructive. The shape and form bring to mind a barrow, the kind of earthen burial mound associated with prehistoric funerary practice, where a raised or enclosed area marks the remains of the dead. But the combination of a scarp and fosse could equally suggest a ringfort, the circular enclosed farmsteads that are among the most common early medieval monuments in Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. There is a third possibility too. The monument's scale has prompted the observation that it might be ecclesiastical in character, perhaps the enclosure of an early church site or monastic precinct. Lending weight to that reading is the townland name itself: Kilmacrickard, in which the element "Kil" derives from the Irish "cill", meaning a church or cell. Whether the name preserves the memory of an actual foundation here, or is simply coincidental to the earthwork's presence, cannot presently be determined.