It carries the label of ringfort, the circular or oval enclosures built across Ireland throughout the early medieval period, typically as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. But the hilltop position here is more suggestive of something else: scholars have raised the possibility that this is actually an Anglo-Norman ringwork, a type of defensive fortification introduced to Ireland following the twelfth-century invasion, in which an earthen bank and ditch were thrown up on elevated ground to command the surrounding landscape. The distinction matters. One is a farming enclosure; the other is a deliberate military statement.

The earthwork was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837, and it also appears on an estate map of Sonna Demesne held in the National Library of Ireland. When the monument was examined in detail in 1980, surveyors found an oval area roughly 34.5 metres north to south and 17.5 metres east to west, defined by an inner bank, an intervening fosse (a defensive ditch), and a fairly substantial outer bank. The inner bank had largely deteriorated, traceable only in sections to the north-northwest and at the south. At the east-south-east, a gap and a slight causeway, the raised approach across the ditch, survive; some stones along the northern edge of the causeway may be the remnants of a revetment, a facing of stone used to stabilise and reinforce the earthwork. The fosse itself is best preserved to the north and south, though it continues in a broader, shallower form to the west. At the centre of the enclosure sits a large rectangular house site, and the south-west corner shows evidence of quarrying that took place at some point before any modern record-keeping. Within roughly 160 metres of this earthwork, another ringfort lies to the north-north-east, while the remains of a castle and a separate house site are clustered about 115 metres to the south and south-east, suggesting this was once a surprisingly dense pocket of settlement and perhaps fortification.