Measuring roughly 18 metres northeast to southwest and 16 metres northwest to southeast, it sits just 50 metres north of the Morningstar River, which marks the boundary between the townlands of Mitchelstowndown East and Mitchelstowndown. What makes it quietly odd is that it went entirely unrecorded by the Ordnance Survey in 1840, when their first large-scale six-inch mapping of Ireland was carried out. Whatever the earthwork was, it had either already been absorbed into the farmed landscape by then, or was simply overlooked.

By the time the 25-inch Ordnance Survey edition appeared in 1897, the feature had made it onto the map, depicted as a scarped oval platform, that is, a raised area of ground defined by a distinct slope or edge on its perimeter. A drainage channel running north to south cuts across its western side, further complicating any reading of the original form. Its classification remains uncertain; the record notes it as a possible earthwork monument, and roughly 110 metres to the northwest lies another site listed as a possible moated site. Moated sites, common in medieval Ireland, typically consisted of a raised platform surrounded by a water-filled ditch, often associated with Anglo-Norman settlement from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries onwards. Whether this platform shares any relationship with that nearby feature is not established. What is clear is that aerial photography has repeatedly confirmed its presence: a cropmark, the kind of ghostly soil-moisture pattern that betrays buried or levelled structures to a camera above, showed up in photographs taken on 3 November 1984 during the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West-Limerick gas pipeline survey. More recently, the outline has remained visible on Digital Globe orthoimagery from 2011 to 2013 and on Google Earth.

The site sits within reclaimed pasture, so access would depend on landowner permission, and there is little on the ground likely to announce itself dramatically to the casual eye. The scarp defining the platform may read more clearly in low winter light, when shadows fall at a shallow angle across the field surface and slight changes in ground level become easier to pick out. A look at the Google Earth satellite view before visiting would give a useful sense of the oval outline and its orientation relative to the drainage channel. The monument carries the record number LI049-023 in the Sites and Monuments Record for County Limerick.