It measures roughly 50 metres east to west and 37 metres north to south, and its layout, an inner bank, an intervening fosse or ditch, and a partial outer bank running only from the west to the north-west, has the geometry of something deliberately made. Yet what it was made for remains an open question.

When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was drawn, the site appeared not as an earthwork at all but as a cluster of trees enclosed by a circular broken line, which tells you something about how it presented itself to the surveyors of the time. That detail has shaped the uncertainty ever since. One possibility is that this is a tree-ring enclosure, a type of feature sometimes created in post-medieval Ireland as a deliberate planting of trees in a circular or oval arrangement, often for ornamental or sheltering purposes on estate land. The other possibility pulls in a much older direction: that the underlying structure is a ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that was common in early medieval Ireland, later tidied up or planted over in a way that gave it a more landscaped appearance. A secondary bank subdividing the interior was added at some point after the original construction, which adds another layer of ambiguity without resolving the central question. Mature trees still grow along the inner bank and throughout the interior, meaning the site continues to look, from certain angles, much as it did when the OS surveyors first noted it down as little more than a wooded circle on a hillside.