Walk the perimeter and it reads as a ringfort, one of the thousands of circular enclosures, typically early medieval in date, that dot the Irish countryside. But the geometry is not quite right. The nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey map records it as closer to a square with rounded corners, and the internal remains of walling, right-angled in plan, point toward something of a different character and era.

The site is known locally, or was known to the historian William Carrigan writing in 1905, as the Shanacourte, meaning Old Court. Carrigan noted the foundations of an ancient building within it and identified it as a boundary marker of some significance, specifically the "meare", or boundary line, between Upper Ossory and Co. Kilkenny as described in an Inquisition of 1621. He placed it in Ballygooney townland, though it actually sits just across the boundary in Ballylehaun. The enclosure is bivallate, meaning it is defended by two concentric banks rather than one, separated by a fosse, a ditch cut between them. The inner bank, fosse, and outer bank are all measurable and largely intact, though both banks are noticeably worn down on the southern side. Stones and small boulders are packed into the bank material throughout. An entrance around four metres wide opens to the west, with a low internal bank running east-west from either side of it across the interior. In the southern quadrant, the tumbled remains of at least one stone building survive, its right-angled walls suggesting a constructed space rather than a purely defensive earthwork. A second possible structure may run from the inner face of the southern bank nearby. Taken together, the roughly square ground plan and the internal buildings suggest a later medieval enclosure rather than the earlier ringfort type it superficially resembles.