That ditch, or fosse, is itself deep and broad, and beyond it there was once an outer bank completing the defensive arrangement. What remains in Gotoon is the kind of monument that rarely draws visitors or headlines, yet it carries the unmistakable geometry of deliberate, organised labour from the early medieval period.

The clearest account of the site comes from a survey carried out by O'Kelly in 1942 to 1943, which recorded the mound as standing nearly twenty feet high over the fosse bottom, with an overall diameter of two hundred and sixteen feet. An enclosure of this type, a raised platform surrounded by a fosse and an outer earthen bank, belongs to a class of monument often associated with ringforts or related enclosures, structures that served as defended farmsteads or seats of local authority across early medieval Ireland. At the time of O'Kelly's description, the monument was densely overgrown with bushes, though these had been cleared by the time the notes were written. The outer bank presented a more sobering picture: it appeared to have been deliberately levelled and its material spread across the surrounding fields, most likely during agricultural improvement at some point after the monument fell out of use. Only a small section on the north-east side survived more or less intact.

The monument is visible on Digital Globe aerial photographs as a tree-covered feature, which makes it easier to locate on satellite imagery than on the ground. It sits in low-lying land, which means the surrounding fields may be wet underfoot depending on the season, and approaching in late summer or early autumn when growth has died back somewhat can make the earthwork easier to read. The surviving fosse and the height of the mound are the features worth looking for; the missing outer bank is almost equally instructive as a record of how these monuments have been quietly dismantled by farming over the centuries.