The bank itself is the most visible fact: up to six metres wide and rising nearly four and a half metres on its outer face, it is a substantial earthwork by any measure, yet it sits quietly in the landscape without signage or ceremony. Earthen enclosures of this type, sometimes called ringforts or raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. This one measures roughly 34 metres north to south and 41.5 metres east to west internally, placing it on the larger end of the scale.

What gives the site its particular character is its relationship with the ground around it. To the east runs the Glashanagalloon stream, a name that translates from the Irish as the stream of the sparrows, which flows northwest into Ballylongford Creek. The enclosure was built to take advantage of the natural slope: the bank on the northern and eastern sides rises steeply above the stream, using the fall of the land as a ready-made defensive feature and reducing the labour required to build an imposing outer face. The interior, by contrast, slopes sharply to the northeast, and in the eastern sector there is a depression measuring roughly five and a half metres by six metres, the purpose of which is not recorded. It may represent a collapsed souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage commonly associated with ringfort settlements and used for storage or refuge, though that remains speculative.