It measures roughly seventeen metres across, its enclosing wall still traceable for much of its circuit, though only just; the interior face rises a bare twenty centimetres above ground level, the exterior face a little more at sixty centimetres, and the whole thing is thick enough, at just over a metre, to suggest it was once a structure of some deliberate purpose rather than a casual field boundary.

This kind of earthwork is broadly classified as an enclosure, a catch-all term in Irish archaeology for roughly circular or oval areas defined by a bank, wall, or ditch, and possibly dating anywhere from the Bronze Age through to the early medieval period. They appear across Cork in considerable numbers, some associated with settlement, others with agriculture or ritual, and many stubbornly resistant to confident interpretation. The Carhoogarriff example is built from earth and stone together, incorporating small boulders into its fabric, and sits on a slope with a hill rising to the north and open farmland rolling away in other directions. The level interior, which might once have told a clearer story through surface features or earthworks, is now obscured by overgrowth. Someone, at some point relatively recently, added a pile of stones at the centre, a small act of unknown intention that sits a little incongruously inside something that has been accumulating its own quiet centuries for a very long time.