It measures roughly 32 metres north to south and 31 metres east to west, close enough to a circle that the slight difference reads as natural settling rather than poor planning. At its eastern edge, the enclosure blurs into a field bank running along the ridge, as though the landscape has gradually absorbed it.

The earliest modern record of the site appears on the 1834 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it is marked in the distinctive gothic lettering the OS reserved for antiquities and labelled simply as a 'fort'. That word, in the Irish archaeological tradition, generally refers to a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period onward, typically consisting of a circular area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. The Clanickny example retains its bank and fosse on the north-west to north-east arc, though elsewhere the original boundaries have softened or merged into the working landscape of the ridge.