The ground reads almost as a trick of the light, a shallow circular rise of around twenty metres across, with the ghost of a surrounding fosse, a water-filled or dry ditch that once reinforced the enclosure's boundary, still just about legible along its north-easterly arc. To the east and south-southwest, the land drops away sharply, suggesting the original builders understood their topography well, using the natural fall of the slope to reinforce the defensibility of the site.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when their enclosure was formed by an earthen bank rather than stone, were the dominant settlement form in early medieval Ireland, broadly from the sixth to the twelfth centuries. Most housed a single farming family and their livestock. The example at Annakisha was already compromised by the mid-nineteenth century: the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records it as a hachured circular enclosure of roughly twenty-two metres in diameter, the cartographers' standard method of indicating an earthwork, but by the time of any modern inspection the bank had been levelled almost entirely into the surrounding pasture. The slight discrepancy between the 1842 diameter and the approximately twenty-metre spread visible on the ground is consistent with gradual agricultural erosion over the intervening generations.