The earthworks are almost entirely gone now, erased by land reclamation work carried out in the early 1970s. What survives is a ghost, legible only from the air as a cropmark, the kind of faint discolouration in summer grass that reveals buried features invisible at ground level. Even before it was levelled, the enclosure had disappeared from official consciousness in a sense: it does not appear on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, though it does show up on the 1913 edition as a rectilinear enclosure. Someone, at some point, stopped recording it, and then someone else destroyed it.

The cropmark shows a trapezoidal enclosure roughly 38 metres north to south and widening from about 40 metres at the north to around 50 metres at the south. Three sides, the west, north, and east, were defined by an earthen bank with projections of six to seven metres at the north-east and north-west corners. A bastioned fort is a fortification type developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, characterised precisely by these angled projections, or bastions, which eliminated blind spots along the walls and allowed defenders to fire along the face of the rampart. Outside the bank here ran a fosse, a defensive ditch, now infilled to a width of roughly three metres. The south side required no bank; the enclosure ends at an eroding cliff face five to six metres high, dropping directly to a rocky shore and a cobble and sand beach. A local resident, Leo Leyden of Maugherow, recalled the structure still intact in the late 1960s, its bank and projections substantial but heavily overgrown. In 2016, geophysical surveys using magnetic gradiometry and earth resistance techniques produced evidence of pits, postholes, and linear features in the interior, along with a concentration of high resistance readings at the centre that may indicate a demolished stone building. Taken together, the data hints at timber and stone structures that once housed troops and artillery.

Standing in the field today, the outline of the enclosure is barely discernible underfoot. The corner projections, now just low swellings in the turf, sit at the highest point of the south-facing slope, positioned so that anyone stationed there would have had a clear view along the coastline in both directions and out towards the mouth of Sligo Bay. It is the sort of arrangement that makes the military logic immediately obvious, even when the military architecture itself has all but vanished.