The raised area measures roughly 24 metres across and is enclosed by an earthen bank that still stands to an external height of about 1.75 metres. What lifts it out of the ordinary is what lies beneath: a souterrain, the term for an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, built into the interior of the enclosure.

Structures like this belong to the class of monument known as a rath, an earthen ringfort of the kind constructed throughout Ireland, broadly during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. Raths were typically farmsteads, the enclosing bank offering a degree of security for a household and its livestock rather than functioning as a military fortification in any serious sense. The souterrain associated with this example would have served as a place of refuge or storage, perhaps both, entered from inside the enclosure and extending underground. Hundreds of such sites survive across Cork alone, many of them in equally unassuming condition, quietly occupying corners of farmland while the fields around them have been worked for more than a thousand years.