The feature sits on the southern slope of a low hill in gently undulating ground at Ballinlabaun, measuring approximately 18 metres north to south and 16 metres east to west. Its northern half is cut noticeably into the rising ground, creating an internal slope of around two metres that gradually levels out toward the south, where the perimeter dissolves almost flush with the surrounding field. A sod-covered, stony rim survives along the eastern and south-eastern edge, up to four metres wide in places, but elsewhere the boundary is poorly defined. A ring of hawthorn follows the perimeter, which is itself quietly suggestive, since hawthorn has long been associated with boundaries and liminal spaces in the Irish countryside.

What complicates any straightforward reading of the site is its cartographic history. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838 records nothing here at all, yet the 1922 edition marks it clearly as a hachured circle, a surveying convention used to indicate a raised or defined earthwork. That gap of nearly a century leaves open the possibility that the feature was either overlooked in the earlier survey or had not yet taken on its present, more legible form through quarrying activity. A rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen ringfort of early medieval date, lies just seven metres to the west, and the proximity of the two features adds another layer of uncertainty. Whether the sunken hollow was once related to that enclosure in some functional or spatial way, or whether it has nothing to do with it at all, remains unresolved.