Roughly 100 metres across and covered in grass, it is defined by the traces of a scarped embankment, a slope cut into the hillside to form a raised edge, much of which has been absorbed into ordinary field banks and hedgerows over the centuries. The 1834 Ordnance Survey six-inch map labels it in gothic lettering as a fort, and the 1907 edition describes it as a large subcircular enclosure, but there is no identifiable fosse, the defensive ditch that typically accompanies such earthworks, and no discernible entrance. The honest conclusion reached by those who have examined it is that it may not be a fort at all, but rather a landscape feature.

That possibility becomes more interesting when considered alongside a curious piece of political geography nearby. About 1.9 kilometres to the north-northwest lies the southwestern tip of a designed landscape feature known as the Thistle, situated just west of Aughancloy village in County Tyrone. The Thistle was laid out after 1722 by Acheson Moore, a Jacobite, who shaped the land into the form of the Scottish thistle as a declaration of his sympathies with the exiled Stuart cause. Moore was making a statement in the landscape at a time when making it openly would have carried considerable risk. The enclosure at Moy is one of at least three hilltop enclosures in County Monaghan that fall within one to two kilometres of the Thistle's southwestern tip, and together with four comparable large enclosures in County Tyrone, these earthworks may have been intended to function as outlying rosettes, elaborating and completing the overall design. A similarly scaled enclosure at Skinnahergna lies about 950 metres to the west, suggesting a deliberate spatial arrangement rather than coincidence. Whether any of these earthworks were constructed specifically for Moore's scheme or were older features incorporated into it remains an open question, but the alignment is difficult to dismiss entirely.