The circular enclosure, roughly 23 metres across, is not dramatically visible from a distance; what gives it away is a differential growth pattern, the tendency of the vegetation within and around an ancient earthwork to grow differently from the surrounding land, betraying the buried or eroded features beneath. This kind of site is known as a rath or ringfort, an earthen enclosure, typically dating from between the sixth and tenth centuries, that once served as a farmstead or family compound. A low wide bank, only about a quarter of a metre in external height, rings the interior, and just outside it sits a waterlogged fosse, a defensive ditch that runs in a shallow ring around the bank. A gap of four metres to the south-east marks what was once the entrance.

The fort does not stand alone in this landscape. A second ringfort lies roughly fourteen metres to the south-west, and additional earthen banks extend from the site in a south-easterly direction. These trailing features may represent the remains of an earlier field system, suggesting that the land here was organised and worked over a long period, the ringfort itself perhaps only the most recent layer of habitation. Together, the features point to a corner of north Cork that was actively farmed and settled well before the Norman arrival in Ireland, with boundaries and enclosures being laid out and revised across successive generations.