Its low bank of earth and stone, about 2.3 metres wide and just 35 centimetres high, encloses a gently raised interior, and nowhere along its circuit is there a recognisable entrance. That absence is itself telling. Monuments built for defence or for farming tend to have gates, gaps, or causeways. This one apparently did not need one.

The 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map offers the clearest clue to its purpose. At that date the enclosure was shown with trees planted along its perimeter, and a roadway running roughly north-east to south-west divided the interior into unequal portions. This is the vocabulary of designed landscape, the deliberate shaping of countryside into something aesthetically considered, a practice associated in Ireland with the estates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tree-rings of this kind were sometimes planted as ornamental features, as windbreaks, or as visual anchors within a wider demesne layout, chosen as much for how they read from a house window or a carriage drive as for any practical function. A second enclosure of comparable size lies to the north-west, and the two together strengthen the case that what survives here is the remains of an intentional composition rather than anything older or more utilitarian.