That positioning was the whole point. Whoever built this ringfort, the broad term for the circular enclosed settlements common across early medieval Ireland, chose the knoll deliberately, raising a substantial bank around the summit and digging a deep fosse, or defensive ditch, around the outside. The result is a site that reads as quietly formidable even now.

The earthworks are considerable. An inner bank, standing about 1.1 metres high internally, runs around the knoll for a circuit of roughly 44 metres. Outside that sits a fosse measuring some 2.2 metres deep, and beyond it an outer bank rising to 2.8 metres on its exterior face. That outer bank is the more striking feature, and it was already attracting notice by the late 1930s. A 1937 account by Broker, recorded when the site was on land belonging to a James Kelliher, described it as covering a statute acre and as the biggest enclosure of its kind in the area. Even then, roughly half of the fence had been destroyed, and the fosse was noted as being around twenty feet deep. One section of the inner bank, stone-faced on its interior side, had been incorporated into the surrounding field fence system and now forms the south-west corner of a field, which gives some sense of how these ancient earthworks quietly absorbed into the landscape over time rather than being cleared away.