It takes the form of a roughly circular, flat-topped platform, about 29 metres across from north to south and rising to just 0.7 metres above the surrounding ground via a gentle scarp. There is no surrounding ditch, known in archaeological terms as a fosse, and no outer bank, which sets it apart from the more familiar profile of a ringfort, where such defensive features are common. What it was originally built for remains an open question.

The platform was recorded as early as the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch mapping, where hachure marks, the small lines used by cartographers to suggest the shape of raised ground, indicated its circular outline. It reappears on the revised 25-inch Ordnance Survey edition of 1901, though curiously it was dropped from the revised six-inch edition of the same period, a small bibliographic anomaly that suggests it was overlooked or considered unremarkable by at least one surveying team. The 1901 25-inch map also records the placename Kiltaroe in the fields immediately to the east. The first element, "cill", typically denotes an early church or ecclesiastical enclosure in Irish placenames, which raises the possibility that this part of the landscape carried some religious or communal significance in the early medieval period, though no such structure has been identified at the earthwork itself.