Its setting alone makes it unusual; this is not a monument you stumble across on a country road, but one that requires crossing the lake to reach, and that commands an unobstructed view of the surrounding water and the Westmeath mainland stretching away to the east, south, and west. Whatever its original purpose, whoever built it understood the strategic value of the position.

The site is a bivallate ringfort, meaning it was originally defended by two concentric banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them. Ringforts of this kind are among the most common monument types in Ireland, typically associated with the early medieval period and used as enclosed farmsteads or sites of local authority. What makes this particular example harder to read is how significantly it has changed in the historical record. The 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows it as a substantial rectangular earthwork, large enough to be annotated simply as "Fort". By the revised 1913 edition, it had shrunk on paper to a much smaller D-shaped area, open to the southeast. Whether that reflects genuine deterioration, a change in survey method, or both is unclear. When the site was described in detail in 1976, it measured roughly 53 metres across its northeast-southwest axis, still oval in outline, with the inner bank best preserved along the western and northern arc but heavily damaged elsewhere by gaps and what appear to be later excavations. A shallow fosse and low outer bank survive on the same western side. Unusually, the southeast sector shows the outer bank and fosse curving outward to define a small crescent-shaped annexe, around 20 metres across, which may have been added after the main enclosure was built. Inside the ringfort, deep cultivation ridges run east to west across the gently sloping interior, with fainter ridges running north to south in the southwest corner, hinting at phases of agricultural use long after the enclosure's defensive or residential purpose had passed. No original entrance has been identified.

The outline of the enclosure and its annexe remains clearly legible from aerial photography, which is perhaps the most honest way to appreciate its full shape, given how abraded the banks have become at ground level.