The earthwork is so low, its inner bank barely fifteen centimetres above the enclosed surface and its outer edge only a little more, that a person walking across it might not register it as anything other than uneven grazing land. To the west and east, even the surrounding fosse, the shallow drainage ditch that once reinforced the enclosure's boundary, is legible only because the vegetation growing along it differs from what surrounds it.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths when their boundaries are formed by earthen banks rather than stone, were the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, probably from roughly the fifth century through to the twelfth. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation; this one near Glengarriff is among the more quietly diminished examples. It was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842 as a hachured circular enclosure of about thirty metres in diameter, which was the standard cartographic shorthand for a raised earthwork at the time. By the time the same area was mapped again in 1936, the depiction had shifted to a penannular form, meaning the enclosure appeared open or interrupted on one side, running from the north-west around to the south-south-west. The current ground survey confirms an oval rather than a true circle, measuring roughly 28 metres east to west and just under 21 metres north to south. The south-west to west section of the bank is the least distinct, where the ground softens into a marshy area and the boundary becomes difficult to read. A spring lies a few metres to the north-west of the site, which is the kind of practical, water-adjacent positioning that characterises many ringfort locations across Ireland.