Running roughly northeast to southwest for about 250 metres, the ridge is short but steep-sided, and along its summit a narrow trackway, some eight metres wide, runs the length of the high ground. On either side of this trackway, a series of terraces step down the slopes, each between three and four metres wide, while the western flank is further defined by a linear bank and fosse. A fosse is simply a defensive ditch, typically dug to make an approach more difficult or to mark a boundary, and here two wide examples cut across the ridge at right angles, running northwest to southeast. One sits at the southwest end, where it separates the earthwork from an associated castle site recorded on the old Ordnance Survey six-inch maps. A second, somewhat shallower fosse lies toward the northeast end of the ridge.

The combination of features, the terracing, the trackway, the flanking bank and the paired fosses, suggests this was not a casual or incidental landscape. The castle recorded at the southwest end of the ridge gives the earthwork its clearest historical anchor, and the fosse dividing the two sites implies that the earthwork and the castle, whatever their precise relationship, were at some point treated as distinct zones. The steep natural sides of the glacial ridge would have made the position defensible with relatively little additional effort, which is presumably part of why it attracted occupation or fortification in the first place. The ridge itself is a product of glacial action rather than human construction, one of the many elongated landforms left across the Irish midlands after the last ice age reshaped the ground.