The enclosure at Downs sits on a south-facing slope and, from what surveyors have been able to determine, takes the form of a low earthen bank encircling an ovoid interior, with a shallow external fosse, the fosse being a ditch dug around the outside of an enclosure as a defensive or boundary feature. It is the kind of earthwork that, once you know what to look for, becomes recognisable across the Irish countryside, though here the vegetation has made even that difficult.

The monument was recorded on the 1923 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which gives a sense of its dimensions: roughly 30 metres north to south and 45 metres east to west. That record was made when the feature was presumably more visible. By the time Denis Power compiled his survey notes, uploaded in August 2011, the enclosure had become largely inaccessible due to overgrowth. Power also noted that both a field boundary running from the east around to the south, and a public road skirting the southern to western edge, may have truncated the enclosing element over the years. In other words, the boundary of the enclosure itself has likely been clipped and altered by the ordinary infrastructure of farming life accumulating around it across the decades and centuries.

Access to the earthwork itself is not straightforward. The public road does skirt its southern and western sides, which at least brings a visitor close, but the dense overgrowth that had already made the interior largely inaccessible in 2011 will not have improved with time. The enclosure sits in pasture, so any closer inspection would require landowner permission. What can be observed from the road margin is the general contour of the slope and, with some patience, perhaps a suggestion of the bank where the vegetation thins. The fosse and the full circuit of the bank are unlikely to be legible without clearance work. It is, in that sense, a monument that rewards knowing it is there more than it rewards arrival.