The ground rises almost imperceptibly, a shallow dish of raised earth roughly fifteen metres across, ringed by a low earthen bank and, where it survives, an outer fosse, the term for a ditch dug as part of a defensive or boundary circuit. Neither is dramatic in scale: the bank reaches barely thirty centimetres in internal height and the fosse is perhaps thirty centimetres deep. What makes the site quietly odd is precisely how much of it has been worn away or absorbed into the working landscape around it.

The bank has disappeared entirely along the southern arc, from the south-east around to the south-west, and a mortared stone wall of modern construction now runs across that same southern edge, following a roughly north-east to south-west line. The fosse, meanwhile, survives only along the north-eastern to south-eastern stretch, absent everywhere else. The original entrance, which would normally offer a clue about the enclosure's age and purpose, cannot be identified. Circular earthwork enclosures of this general type are common across Ireland and range widely in date, from the prehistoric through to the early medieval period, when they were used as farmsteads, burial grounds, or places with ritual significance. The townland name, Fortland, suggests a local memory of something fortified or enclosed here, though the placename alone cannot tell us what form that enclosure originally took or when it was built.