The first edition of the Ordnance Survey map records it clearly, along with a cluster of associated features, but what a visitor encounters on the ground today is something considerably more elusive: a semicircular scarp, roughly two metres high, surviving only along the western half of what was once a complete circuit. The enclosing bank itself has been removed, and its outline can no longer be traced. Two possible structures, shown as circular outlines within the interior, have left no surface trace. Neither has a very small enclosure that the OS map shows pressed against the northern side of the site. The place exists most completely on paper.

Enclosures of this kind, typically circular earthworks defined by a bank and ditch, are among the most common monument types in the Irish countryside, often associated with early medieval settlement and farming. They are sometimes called ringforts, though that term covers a considerable variety of forms and functions. At Cappanacush, the evidence is now fragmentary enough that confident interpretation is difficult. A trackway running north to south along the western edge of the site hints at a longer history of movement through the landscape, the enclosure perhaps sited in relation to a route that predates or parallels it. A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan documented the site as part of their archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, and it is through that record that the fuller picture of what once stood here can at least be imagined.