The intrusion is itself sod-covered stone, indistinguishable at a glance from the older fabric around it, which gives the site an air of slow accumulation rather than deliberate preservation. Much of the enclosure has been partly levelled, and what remains is unassuming: a low stony bank, grass-grown and barely knee-height on its exterior face, fading on the southern side to little more than a ripple in the ground.

The enclosure sits towards the south-western end of a north-east to south-west ridge, with the ground falling away steeply to the south-east and again to the west and south-west. Red Hill overlooks it from the east. This kind of enclosed site, defined by a bank of earth and stone, would typically have served as a farmstead or enclosure for livestock in early medieval Ireland, and the landscape position here is characteristic of that tradition, using the natural contours of a ridge for partial shelter and drainage. Immediately to the west lies a cashel, a term for a stone-walled enclosure of similar early medieval origin, suggesting that this corner of Farranyharpy once held a small cluster of related structures rather than a single isolated feature. The relationship between the two is not fully resolved, but their proximity is unlikely to be coincidental.