By the early 1960s it had been levelled, and the surface today betrays little of what was once a defined ceremonial structure. A ring barrow is a burial monument of the Bronze Age type, typically a low central mound surrounded by a circular ditch and an outer earthen bank, and this one followed that pattern closely.

When the archaeologist P. J. Hartnett examined the site, he recorded a circular raised platform of roughly seven metres in diameter, enclosed by a fosse approximately one metre deep and an outer bank standing about 0.6 metres high, with a causewayed entrance facing east. The Ordnance Survey had been mapping it consistently since 1842, showing it as a hachured circular raised area around twelve metres across, and it appears again on both the 1903 and 1938 editions. That 1938 map also marks what appears to be a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, at the centre of the site. The landowner, however, had a different explanation for the central depression: according to Hartnett's 1939 account, so-called "gold diggers" had dug a hole there at some point, presumably in the hope that a prehistoric burial mound might yield precious objects. The depression they left was still visible. A second similar hollow sits nearby in the same field, and a closely related ring barrow of the same type lies only about five metres to the south, suggesting this small corner of Cork was once a place of some deliberate funerary significance.