The enclosure is roughly D-shaped, its straight side running northeast to southwest across eighteen metres, with a curved projection extending about eleven metres to the southeast. That combination of straight and curved, with an interior bank of compacted earth and stone still standing to nearly a metre in height, suggests a deliberately bounded space rather than a casual agricultural boundary, even if the exact purpose has never been firmly established.

The bank itself is reinforced along its northeastern outer face with stone revetment, a facing of upright stones used to hold an earthen bank in place and prevent it from slumping. Inside the enclosure, close to the southwestern bank, a small standing stone just under half a metre tall has been recorded, with a second, smaller upright a couple of metres to its southeast. Standing stones placed within enclosures are known from elsewhere in Ireland, sometimes interpreted as markers, sometimes as structural features, sometimes as something older around which later boundaries were built. What makes the Barradaw site particularly interesting is its immediate neighbour: a fulacht fiadh sits directly to the southwest. A fulacht fiadh is a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal beside a trough, and they are among the most common ancient monuments in the Irish landscape. Whether the enclosure and the fulacht fiadh were in use at the same time, or whether one came before the other and the proximity is coincidental, remains an open question. Together, though, they suggest this quiet corner of east Cork was a place of some activity long before anyone drew the field boundaries that now surround it.