It measures about 42 metres on its longer axis and just over 36 metres across, and what defines it is not a wall or a ditch so much as the ghost of one: an earthen bank, largely overgrown, that has slumped in places to little more than a scarp, a low step in the turf. Around the south-western arc, traces of an external fosse survive, the fosse being the shallow ditch that would originally have run outside the bank, its spoil thrown inward to raise the rampart above it. At the south-west the fosse top measures 3.5 metres wide, narrowing to 2 metres at the base, with an external depth of just 0.4 metres, modest figures that suggest either significant silting over the centuries or a structure that was never intended to be purely defensive.

The enclosure belongs to a class of monument broadly described as earthen ring-forts, known in Irish as raths or lios, which were built and occupied across Ireland roughly between the early medieval period and the Norman arrival in the twelfth century, though some continued in use later. They served not primarily as military fortifications but as enclosed farmsteads, the bank and fosse marking the boundary of a household and its livestock rather than the perimeter of a garrison. The sitting of this one at the crest of an east-facing drumlin slope, a drumlin being one of those smooth, elongated hills of glacially deposited material that give County Monaghan its corrugated look, would have offered both visibility across lower ground and some natural drainage advantage. Several gaps now break the bank, but the likeliest original entrance appears to have been on the east-south-east side, where a gap 3.5 metres wide at the base aligns with the downslope direction, a sensible orientation for a working farmstead needing easy access to fields below.