Roughly circular and somewhere between 55 and 60 metres in external diameter, it is large enough to have once been a significant feature of the landscape, yet standing in the pasture today a visitor would find nothing to see. No earthwork rises above the grass, no bank catches the light at a low angle. The site survives, in any practical sense, only as an outline on the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, that first great systematic survey of Ireland, which recorded the enclosure at a moment when it was apparently still legible, before whatever remained was finally levelled or obscured.

Embanked enclosures of this type are broadly related to the ringfort tradition, the enclosed farmsteads and settlement sites that were built in their thousands across Ireland, mostly during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. A ringfort typically consists of a circular area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used to protect a homestead and its livestock. What survives at Haystown fits that general category, though the enclosure's precise date and function are unknown. Its position towards the eastern edge of the ridge top is consistent with the kind of elevated, well-drained ground that was favoured for such sites. Notably, a ringfort that does retain its own separate designation sits only about 35 metres to the west, suggesting this part of the ridge was a focus for settlement or activity over some period, with the two features forming a quiet cluster on land that has long since returned to ordinary farmland.