The overall structure measures roughly 66 metres north to south and 56 metres east to west, yet the eye is drawn inward to the central platform, which spans about 20 metres across. A ring-barrow of this kind is a funerary monument, typically prehistoric in origin, consisting of a burial mound enclosed within a circular ditch or fosse and an encircling bank, distinguishing it from a simple mound by that deliberate, enclosing geometry. What makes Moanahila quietly compelling is how little of it declares itself: there is no visible entrance, the fosse drops to an internal height of 2.6 metres while barely registering on the outside, and the whole thing has been slowly swallowed by trees and scrub over many decades.

The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 as a small oval enclosure, and by the time of the 1897 twenty-five-inch edition it is recorded more precisely as a flat-topped mound surrounded by two fosses. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland inspected it in 1999, the monument was described as densely overgrown with restricted access, a condition that aerial and satellite imagery has since confirmed rather than contradicted. Orthoimages captured between 2005 and 2013 show a roughly circular tree-covered area, and a Google Earth image from November 2018 reveals that the outer margin of the site to the south and south-east has been levelled, partly by two field boundaries that cut across both the fosse and the external bank on the north-east and south-east sides. Those linear earthworks visible along the southern edge are likely the compressed remains of the original outer bank. A ringfort lies approximately 390 metres to the south-west, suggesting this part of Moanahila held significance across more than one period of use. The record was compiled by Edmond O'Donovan and uploaded in October 2020.

Access is the central difficulty here. The site sits in private pasture land, and the dense vegetation noted during the 1999 survey has not visibly cleared in the years since. The good views to the north and south that the slope affords are easier to appreciate from nearby than from within the monument itself, where tree cover obscures much of the interior. Those with a particular interest in earthwork archaeology may find the aerial imagery, available through the OSi and Google Earth platforms, more informative than a ground-level visit. The partial truncation by field boundaries is visible even from those overhead views, giving a sense of how agricultural activity has gradually altered the outer edges while the core of the monument has persisted, largely intact beneath its covering of trees.