Roughly circular and about 35 metres across, it belongs to that large class of early medieval Irish enclosures known as raths, earthen-banked enclosures that once served as farmsteads for families of some local standing. What makes this one quietly interesting is how it was designed to work with its terrain: a conventional earthen bank survives along the western to east-south-eastern arc, reaching nearly a metre in height, but on the sides facing the steep wooded drop to the stream, the natural scarp simply takes over, making a constructed bank unnecessary. The builders were working with the land rather than against it.

The outer fosse, a defensive ditch dug around the outside of the bank, survives in short sections to the east and west, where the ground begins to level off and the topography stops doing the work on its own. Its recorded depth of just under a metre gives some sense of the original effort involved in cutting and throwing up the spoil. The interior is now overgrown and slopes southward, but the basic logic of the enclosure remains legible. Ringforts of this kind were constructed throughout Ireland roughly between the sixth and tenth centuries, and while their popular image is military, most functioned as enclosed farmsteads, their banks and ditches marking territory and keeping livestock in as much as keeping anyone out. In Cork alone, thousands of examples survive in various states of preservation, making the county one of the densest concentrations of the monument type in the country.