The enclosure near Hillswood measures roughly 33 metres in diameter and is defined by a low bank, though that bank has largely disappeared along its northern to south-eastern arc, leaving only a partial outline. Outside the bank runs a fosse, the term for the ditched channel dug to throw up the material that formed the bank in the first place. Together, bank and fosse were the signature construction method of enclosed settlements across early medieval Ireland, and what survives here is the faint shadow of that same tradition.

The enclosure sits about 250 metres south-east of Hillswood House, in low-lying wet pastureland, precisely the kind of ground that was once more workable than it appears today and that communities in earlier centuries managed through drainage and careful land use. Circular enclosures of this type, sometimes called ring forts or raths depending on their construction, were domestic settlements as much as defensive ones, typically surrounding a farmstead and its outbuildings. The poor state of preservation here makes it difficult to read much more into the site, but the footprint alone is enough to suggest that someone once chose this particular patch of north Galway as a place worth enclosing and inhabiting.