The earthwork itself is modest in scale, an interior diameter of roughly 9.7 metres east to west, ringed by a low earthen bank and a shallow outer fosse, the term for the ditch that typically surrounds a defended enclosure. What complicates the picture is that a later field bank cuts straight through the monument from east to west, and there is a reasonable possibility that the whole thing is not a fort in any military or residential sense at all, but a tree-ring, the circular depression and raised edge left behind when a large tree, often a single prominent specimen, falls and its root mass slowly decomposes over centuries.

Drumlins are the elongated, egg-shaped hills formed from glacial debris that give much of counties Leitrim, Cavan, and Fermanagh their distinctive lumpy topography. A prominent drumlin placed centrally among valley junctions would have been a natural choice for a landmark, a lookout, or a focal point of some kind, whether the earthwork on its summit was deliberately constructed or is simply the ghost of a long-fallen tree. The ambiguity is part of what makes the site quietly interesting. Small ringforts across Ireland were typically built between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries as enclosed farmsteads, with banks and ditches defining a domestic space rather than a military one. The dimensions here fall at the smaller end of that tradition, which may lend weight to the tree-ring hypothesis, though neither reading has been ruled out.