That anonymity is itself a clue. Most earthworks of comparable age carry some local memory, some fragment of folklore or a field name that hints at what lies beneath the grass. This one does not. What survives is a subtly raised, subcircular area roughly 31 metres east to west and 28 metres north to south, defined by a scarp barely 20 centimetres high and just over a metre wide. The interior is level and waterlogged, filled with rushes in a way that suggests it holds rather than sheds water, and that ponding quality is central to the puzzle of what it actually is.

The site was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 as a circular enclosure sitting immediately south of the townland boundary with Gannavane Upper, and appeared again on the later 25-inch map as a suboval shape defined by a fosse, a term for a ditch or trench, intersected by that same boundary running east to west. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland examined it in 1999, surveyors noted that the scarp disappears between the west-northwest and northwest, which may indicate an original entrance. A relic field boundary extends outward from the southeast exterior, suggesting the monument was already ancient when later agricultural boundaries were laid around it. The working hypothesis now is that it may be a pond barrow, a type of Bronze Age funerary monument consisting of a water-filled or marshy depression enclosed by a bank, rather than the ringfort, a circular defended enclosure typically of early medieval date, it might superficially resemble. A second possible pond barrow or quarry hole lies roughly 35 metres to the southwest.

The monument sits on the edge of a south-southwest-facing slope with open views across a wide arc from east through south and west to northwest, with the summit of Cullaun Mountain approximately one kilometre to the north. Because the earthwork is so slight, it reads far more clearly from aerial imagery than from ground level; it was visible as a distinct oval enclosed by a band of differential grass growth on Digital Globe orthophotographs taken between 2011 and 2013, and again on a Google Earth image from November 2018. On the ground, the rush-covered interior and the faint surrounding scarp are what to look for. Approach on foot across what is described as level but poorly drained upland ground, and expect the kind of monument that rewards patience and a good eye rather than one that announces itself.