At ground level, the low earthwork is barely legible, its southern arc no more than 0.3m high and 3.7m wide. From an aerial photograph, however, the sub-circular outline snaps into focus, a neat ring pressed into a west-facing limestone spur above the flat valley floor between the Stacks Mountains and the Slieve Mish range.

The enclosure came to light in 1999 when Michael Connolly, then County Archaeologist for Kerry, directed trial excavations ahead of road construction on the new N22 link between Ballycarty Cross and the Killarney road. The Office of Public Works had commissioned the work, and what Connolly found was a site considerably more complex than the road corridor alone suggested. The spur on which the enclosure sits is composed of Carboniferous limestone, a type of rock that here takes the form of a Waulsortian reef, a biologically built mound of ancient marine sediment, and it carries a remarkable density of fossil evidence just beneath a thin soil cover. Early maps record the low-lying ground around the spur as marshy, which would have made the reef appear almost island-like, approachable only from the east. From that elevated position, now just 29.5m above sea level at the excavated area, the spur commands views of the two most accessible mountain passes and two fording-points on the River Lee as it bends sharply westward toward the sea at Blennerville. The small enclosure is only one element of a much larger complex on the reef, which also includes ramparts, a causeway, a hilltop enclosure tentatively identified as a henge, quarry ditches, and cairns.

The enclosure itself measures roughly 20m by 21.3m externally and 12.5m by 13.5m internally. Its northern boundary is not a constructed bank but rather the steep natural scarp of the spur, reinforced by the southern edge of the adjacent causeway feature, which sits on a higher terrace and so creates an abrupt drop of around 0.6m along that side. The result is a small, sheltered space whose precise function remains unresolved, quietly embedded in a landscape that clearly mattered to people over a very long period.