What makes the site quietly compelling is not the castle alone but the largely vanished enclosure that once wrapped around it, a feature that aerial photography has done more to reveal than anything visible at ground level today.

Aerial photographs taken in 1966 show the castle positioned at the centre of an oval-shaped enclosure measuring roughly 116 metres north to south and 80 metres east to west. The enclosure was defined by a wide water-filled moat, a type of defensive ditch designed to impede approach and reflect status as much as repel attack, along with a flat-topped outer bank running from the south around through the west to the northwest. The moat's base was around two and a half metres wide, widening to between four and six metres at the top. Leading up to the enclosure on its eastern side were linear earthworks, essentially managed approach routes or boundary features cut into the ground, that suggest the site was carefully organised rather than casually fortified. On the ground today, the moat survives as a deep oval depression on the southern to northern arc, but elsewhere it has been filled in. The outer bank, where it can be traced at all, rises less than half a metre above the surrounding land, enough to suggest its original form but easily missed by anyone not specifically looking for it. The site occupies a genuine vantage point, with good views in all directions despite its modest elevation, which helps explain why this particular outcrop, edged on one side by bog, was chosen in the first place.