On the southern and western sides, the cliff face itself serves as the enclosing wall, making artificial construction unnecessary in those directions. Elsewhere, the builders filled in what the landscape left incomplete.

The fort is roughly subcircular in plan, measuring about 34 metres from south-southeast to north-northwest and 28 metres across its shorter axis. An earth and stone bank, approximately 2.4 metres wide, defines most of the perimeter, rising around half a metre on the interior and just over a metre on the exterior face. To the west and north, a natural scarp, a steep slope or escarpment in the ground, takes over from the bank. A shallow external fosse, or defensive ditch, roughly 2 metres wide, runs outside the bank as an additional obstacle. Entry was made via a causeway at the northeast, a raised pathway across the fosse approximately 6.5 metres wide, which would have been the one controlled point of access to the interior. This combination of natural and constructed defences is characteristic of early Irish ringforts and enclosures, where builders selected sites to minimise the labour of fortification. The details were first documented and published in the Archaeological Inventory of County Laois, compiled by P. David Sweetman, Olive Alcock, and Bernie Moran and published in 1995.