What makes it curious is the way its builders worked the natural landscape into the design: where the ground drops away to a cliff on the south-eastern side, the cliff itself, roughly two metres high, does the defensive work, with only a modest scarp added above it. Elsewhere, earth and effort supplied what geology could not.

The enclosure measures approximately 38.5 metres on its longer axis and just over 22 metres across, making it a substantial feature in the ground even if it no longer announces itself dramatically. Around the northern and western arc, an earthen bank, a raised ring of compacted soil and rubble typical of early Irish ringfort construction, survives in its most complete form on the northern side, where it reaches nearly five and a half metres in width. Running alongside it, on the outer face, is a fosse, the term for a defensive ditch, which at its deepest point on the northern stretch descends to around 1.4 metres. The single entrance, just 1.4 metres wide, opens to the west. That narrowness is deliberate; a gap too wide to defend easily would have defeated the purpose of the whole arrangement. The site was recorded in Michael J. Moore's Archaeological Inventory of County Leitrim, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 2003, which remains the primary source for the county's earthwork monuments.

The fort sits towards the bottom of the eastern and south-eastern slope of Slieve Anierin, the mountain whose name translates roughly as the mountain of iron, a reference to the iron-ore deposits historically associated with this part of Leitrim. The knoll of rock outcrop on which the enclosure was built would have offered its occupants a clear view down the slope and across the terrain below, which, combined with the cliff on the south-eastern edge, suggests the position was chosen with some care. The scrub and bank have softened the silhouette over the centuries, but the fosse and the line of the earthwork are still traceable for much of their circuit.