Yet this enclosure at Gorteenaphooka has a quiet strangeness to it: a raised platform roughly twenty-one to twenty-five metres across, ringed by an earthen bank and an outer fosse, the whole thing settled into poorly drained ground on a low rise above the Cauteen River. The bank, up to nine metres wide at its base, has been largely worn down to a scarp, that is, a slope rather than a standing wall of earth, but enough survives to read the original form clearly enough.

What makes the site particularly interesting is its immediate context. About fifty metres to the north-west sits a moated site, a class of monument typically associated with Anglo-Norman settlement in Ireland, usually dating from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. A moated site consists of a raised platform, originally supporting a house or small farmstead, surrounded by a water-filled or boggy ditch. The enclosure at Gorteenaphooka is a distinct monument, but the two features in such close proximity to one another, both occupying low, damp ground beside the same river, suggest this corner of Tipperary was a place of some sustained human activity. The partial outer bank, still visible from the south-east around to the south and again at the north-west, adds a further layer of complexity to the earthwork, hinting at a more elaborate original design than the present condition makes easy to read.

The site sits in undulating countryside in a field of poorly drained pasture, and the very wet interior recorded here is not incidental; it is part of what the place is. The fosse, between four and five metres wide and up to a metre deep externally, would have reinforced that dampness from the beginning. Anyone approaching across this ground today will notice that the landscape itself seems to resist easy reading, which makes the survival of even this much of the earthwork quietly remarkable.