The ringfort here has been levelled by centuries of agricultural use, leaving only a low rise in a tillage field and a scatter of stones across the surface. Yet the site refuses to disappear entirely: seen from the air, the circular outline of its fosse, a defensive ditch that would originally have surrounded the raised earthen enclosure, reappears as a cropmark, the buried archaeology betraying itself through differential growth in the vegetation above it.

A ringfort, or rath, was the standard form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically a roughly circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used to protect a farmstead and its livestock. The Skenakilla example sat on a gentle south-facing slope, a characteristically practical choice offering shelter and drainage. When it was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1935, it appeared as a hachured penannular rise of around thirty metres in diameter, open to the east, where a possible entrance may have been located. That gap to the east is a detail worth noting: many ringforts were deliberately oriented to face the morning sun, though in this case the opening may simply have reflected the most convenient approach from surrounding land.

The aerial photograph that reveals the fosse as a cropmark comes from the Cork Aerial Survey and Archaeological Photographs collection, and it is this image rather than any visible ground feature that now carries most of the site's legible information. The stones scattered across the field surface suggest the remains of internal structures, though without excavation it is impossible to say more. The site is in active tillage, so what little remains above ground continues to be subject to the same pressures that brought it to its present condition.