It measures approximately 59 metres by 45 metres, with rounded corners softening its otherwise orderly outline, and it was already notable enough to be mapped on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet of 1839. What it actually was built for, however, remains an open question.

The enclosure is defined by an internal fosse, a ditch dug on the inside of the boundary rather than the outside, about 1.2 metres wide and 0.7 metres deep, with an outer bank rising to roughly 0.6 metres and faced with stone in places. These features were judged to be relatively recent in archaeological terms, probably dating to the nineteenth century. Shallow quarry workings found within the interior suggest one possibility: that the enclosure was put up to manage or contain an active stone quarry, keeping livestock out and perhaps marking the extent of the workings. But there is a competing explanation. Enclosures of this kind were sometimes constructed in the nineteenth century purely as fox coverts, small managed plantations of trees maintained to shelter foxes for hunting, or simply as ornamental clumps of trees in an otherwise open landscape. The deciduous trees growing inside the enclosure are noticeably older than those outside it, which suggests that whatever the enclosure's original purpose, it has been sheltering trees for some considerable time. Whether the quarrying came first and the planting followed, or whether the two uses overlapped, is not something the earthwork itself resolves.