The shape it makes is roughly a D, with the sea itself forming the straight edge along the north-west and a collapsed stone structure completing the curve elsewhere. The wall is not dramatic in height, protruding only about half a metre above the shallow bog, but it encloses something in the region of a hundred metres across its longest axis, which gives the whole thing a quiet, deliberate scale that is hard to ignore once you start reading the ground.

The surviving masonry tells a story of partial ruin and partial persistence. Along the southern arc, upright stones remain set both along the line of the wall and at right angles to it, the latter arrangement suggesting a construction technique built to last, or at least to resist the lateral pressure of boggy ground. The northern arc has fared worse; the stones sit lower and several sections have disappeared entirely, absorbed back into the landscape. Inside the enclosure there is a hut site, the traces of a small roofless structure whose occupants and purpose remain unrecorded. About forty metres to the north-east, a grouping of stones has been noted as anomalous, meaning it does not fit neatly into any recognised category of monument, which in archaeological terms is often the most intriguing designation of all.

The site sits in genuinely rough moorland, the kind of terrain that does not reward a casual approach. Crow Head itself is at the far western end of the Beara Peninsula in County Cork, and reaching the promontory involves navigating ground that is boggy underfoot and exposed to whatever the Atlantic is doing on any given day. The wall is not signposted and does not announce itself. What a visitor will find is a low ridge of stone emerging from the surface of the bog, more perceptible as a line than as a structure, curving away toward the shore.