The southern bank stretches for twenty-eight metres and the eastern for ten, together forming what was probably a subrectangular or square enclosure. The earthen bank is substantial, measuring over five metres wide, with an external fosse, a flat-bottomed defensive ditch, still readable at around two metres across at its base. Locally, the remains are known as a lios, the Irish word for a ringfort-type enclosure, and the structure almost certainly belongs to that tradition of early medieval enclosed settlement, even if its exact date has not been established.

What kept these two sides standing while the rest disappeared is a matter of practical farming history rather than deliberate preservation. The bank and fosse were absorbed into the corner of a field boundary, which gave them a continuing functional identity long after their original purpose was forgotten. The eastern boundary of the same field has been levelled entirely, taking with it whatever archaeological evidence once survived there. The interior of the enclosure slopes gently down to the north-west, and cattle grazing has disturbed the ground surface to the point that some undulations are visible but offer no clear pattern. About four hundred and fifty metres to the north-north-west, a rath, another form of earthen ringfort, survives as a separate monument, suggesting that this part of County Cork carried a reasonably dense pattern of early settlement across the landscape. The Galtee Mountains are visible to the north from this spot, a backdrop that the original inhabitants would have known just as well as the cattle that now occupy the ground.