The enclosure measures roughly 35.5 metres across and is defined by a scarp, a sloping earthen edge, that still rises to a maximum height of three metres in places. That a modern field fence now runs along part of its eastern arc is a quietly telling detail: farmers through the centuries have found it easier to follow the line of an ancient boundary than to cut across it.

A rath, as this type of ringfort is also known, was typically a circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, used as a farmstead and sometimes a place of modest status during the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. This example in Ballyshoneen drew the attention of P. J. Hartnett, who noted it in 1939 and recorded that a section of the original rampart was still visible to the north, even then partially overlaid or reused by later agricultural activity. Inside the enclosure, there is a possible souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of stone, typically associated with storage or refuge in ringfort settlements, though its precise condition and extent are not fully established.