The enclosure is roughly 60 metres in diameter, raised artificially to a height of around ten feet, slightly dish-shaped, and ringed by an outer fosse, a defensive ditch, that is faced with stone and holds water in places. A larger companion enclosure lies about 20 metres to the south-west. Together they suggest a site of some complexity, and the smaller of the two has attracted a century's worth of careful guesswork about exactly what it once was.

The documentary thread comes from an extent of lands belonging to Joan, Countess of Gloucester and Hertford, recorded in 1307 for the manor of Dunfert. In it, jurors itemised the buildings standing within the enclosure: a hall, a chamber, a dairy, a grange, a dovecote, and various wooden structures. They also mention a bretage beyond the gate, a bretage being a timber outwork or defensive structure positioned at an entrance. Writing in 1909, the historian Goddard Henry Orpen examined the smaller earthwork and concluded that it was most likely that bretage, an outlying fortified structure serving the main enclosure rather than forming its core. His reading placed the original Dun Fearta, the name from which Dunfert derives, within the larger fort to the south-west, with the smaller mound acting as a kind of defended gateway annexe. The dovecote mentioned in 1307 may also have stood somewhere on or near this spot, which would explain the field name Pigeonpark, a name that has quietly preserved a seven-hundred-year-old detail about how the manor was organised.

By the mid-twentieth century, a small pond sat just outside the south-western quadrant, as shown on the 1947 Ordnance Survey revision, and a field boundary traced the base of the enclosing bank around the monument's circumference. Today the site is overgrown with trees and scrub, the tillage field pressing up around it while the earthwork itself remains largely untouched.