What survives is an oblong raised platform, roughly 31 metres east to west and 20 metres north to south, cut from a natural knoll by two trenches at right angles and levelled flat. Around it runs a fosse, a defensive ditch, that was once, within living memory, filled with water.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp recorded the site in detail between 1914 and 1916, as part of what he mapped as the Gorteen Group of Forts. He described the platform as originally palisaded along its western and southern edges, with the remains of a rectangular house, sixty feet by thirty, standing within the interior. A stone causeway across the southern fosse connected it to a second enclosure immediately to the south. The detail that gives the site its particular atmosphere came from a local man, a Mr Hough of Gorteen, who told Westropp that as a boy, before the river running to the east was artificially deepened, the Earl's House had stood on a shallow lake, its fosse filled with water. The engineering implied by that recollection is considerable: a deliberately isolated, water-girt platform with a causeway as its only formal entrance, all of it now dry and overgrown, its original character entirely lost to drainage works carried out at some point in the intervening generations.

The site is today largely inaccessible, its low profile further obscured by ungrazed woodland. Westropp's careful measurements and his conversation with Mr Hough remain, for now, more legible than the earthworks themselves.