From the air it reads as a tidy tree-ring; on the ground, the story is less certain. Beneath and around those trees lie the eroded remains of an earthen bank, a shallow external fosse (the ditch that typically runs outside such an enclosure), and what may be an entrance gap on the south-western side, around 3.8 metres wide. No definitive evidence of habitation has been found inside. The monument never appears as a labelled antiquity on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which is itself a kind of absence worth noticing.

The ambiguity at the heart of this site is whether it began as a ringfort at all. Ringforts, the circular enclosed settlements that dot the Irish countryside in their thousands, were typically built during the early medieval period to enclose a farmstead and its inhabitants. This one, sitting on the demesne lands of Ballincurra House some 380 metres to the west-southwest, may have been precisely that, later absorbed and reshaped into a decorative tree-ring after 1700 as part of the landscaping fashions of a landed estate. Alternatively, it may always have been a planted enclosure with no prehistoric or early medieval origin at all. The 1837 Ordnance Survey map already shows it as a tree-planted area, and the 1913 revised edition records an oval shape with approximate dimensions of 32 metres north-east to south-west and 27 metres north-west to south-east.

Field descriptions from 1979 and 1980 add texture to the uncertainty. The enclosing bank had by then been worn down to a scarp along much of its circuit, with some external stone facing visible, though observers noted that this stonework may not be original. A gap at the north-east, possibly once a causewayed crossing over the fosse, had been further disturbed by cattle, and two large stones had been dumped into the fosse at that point. Inside, the ground is slightly uneven, with faint traces of broad cultivation ridges running north-east to south-west; similar low ridge remains appear in the surrounding field. Whether those ridges predate or postdate any original enclosure, nobody has been able to say with confidence.