No walls survive, no obvious earthwork catches the eye at ground level. What remains is a shallow fosse, a trench or ditch dug into the earth, barely 0.4 metres deep along its surviving arc from the north-east round to the west, enclosing a roughly circular area some 58 metres across. It is the kind of feature that becomes legible only from above, where aerial photographs reveal the levelled ground within the circuit as a faint but unmistakable signature in the grass.

Enclosures of this general type are among the more common, and more enigmatic, categories of early monument in Ireland. Depending on their size, depth, and associated finds, they might represent a ringfort, a ceremonial or assembly site, a burial enclosure, or something harder to classify. A fosse of only 0.4 metres suggests the boundary here was never heavily defensive; the enclosure's significance was probably social or ritual rather than military. The place-name element Desert, from the Irish "diseart", points towards an early Christian hermitage or ecclesiastical retreat, a small monastic settlement set apart from secular life. If that reading holds, the enclosure may have defined the boundary of such a community, marking off sacred or community ground on the harbour's edge outside the town that would later grow at Clonakilty.