It no longer rises from the ground in any obvious way, yet its oval footprint, measuring roughly 41.5 metres east to west and 30.5 metres north to south, remains legible in the landscape if you know where to look. The eastern and northern edges survive as an earthen field boundary standing some 2.2 metres high, which is the only substantial remnant of what was once a more complete encircling earthwork.

The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1902 as a subrectangular enclosure, shown with hachures indicating its raised profile, and accompanied by an external fosse, the term for a defensive or boundary ditch dug around the outside of an earthen enclosure. By the time the site was catalogued for the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork in 1992, the structure had already been levelled, most likely through generations of agricultural activity on the slope. Enclosures of this type are found across Ireland and generally date to the early medieval period, though without excavation it is difficult to assign a precise date or function to any individual example. They may have served as farmsteads, as places of assembly, or as enclosures for livestock, and their circular or subrectangular forms are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish countryside.

What makes Carhoo quietly interesting is precisely that it has been all but erased. The 1902 map preserves a record of something that the ground itself can no longer fully confirm, and the surviving field boundary, unremarkable to a passing eye, carries the outline of an enclosure that once had a ditch running around its outer edge. In a tillage field on a Cork hillside, that two-metre bank is doing a great deal of quiet historical work.