It is the kind of place that rewards a patient eye rather than a casual glance, because what survives is modest: a low bank of earth and stone tracing a circle roughly thirty-six metres across, worn enough that the untrained eye might read it as nothing more than a natural undulation in the ground.

This is a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland. Typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, ringforts were enclosed farmsteads, their banks and ditches defining a domestic space where a family and their animals lived and worked. The circular form was the norm, and the bank here at Cnoc Tua Mór would originally have been more substantial, perhaps topped with a timber palisade, and accompanied by an outer ditch that has since silted away or been levelled. A gap on the south-eastern side, though considered modern in origin, may follow the line of the original entrance, which in ringforts of this type was often positioned to face the rising sun. More telling of the site's long agricultural afterlife is a field wall that has been laid directly over the monument from the south to the south-west, a reminder that for working farmers in post-medieval Ireland, an old earthwork was frequently less a monument than an obstacle, or at best a convenient source of material for boundary walls.