The interior sits higher than the bank that surrounds it, which gives the enclosure an oddly inverted quality; you stand inside and look down at the earthwork rather than up at it. A narrow external fosse, a shallow ditch dug around the outside of a defensive bank, runs around the perimeter, and gaps interrupt the bank on each side. A stand of Scots Pine now occupies the interior. Local tradition holds that nuns were buried here, a detail that does not obviously connect to anything else recorded about the site, and which gives the hilltop an air of quiet, unresolved strangeness.

The place appears to carry a very old name. Writing in 1932, the scholar Power identified this site with the 'Sonnach Gobann' mentioned in the medieval territorial description Crichad an Chaoilli, a text that catalogued the geography of early Munster. The name translates as 'Gobha's Palisade' or 'the smith's palisade', and Power argued that the townland of Shanagh itself takes its name from this feature. He described it as a 'former dun', meaning an early Irish fortified enclosure or stronghold, and concluded that what once stood here was a well-defended structure, of which this unassuming earthwork is all that survives. The site was further complicated by a misidentification: Healy, writing in 1988, visited and described the location in error as the site of Shanagh Castle, a separate monument that lies around 130 metres to the south-west. The confusion is understandable given the tangle of overlapping histories on the hill, but it meant the enclosure spent some time in the record attached to the wrong story entirely.