From above, it reads as a neat circular plantation; on the ground, it turns out to be a bivallate ringfort, meaning a settlement enclosure defended by two concentric banks with a ditch between them, a form that was common across early medieval Ireland but is rarely as well preserved in its structural detail as this one. The earthwork measures roughly 50 metres north to south and 47 metres east to west, and it sits at the south-eastern end of its ridge with open views in every direction, the kind of position that was chosen deliberately, not by accident.

The site appears as a substantial circular earthwork on the first Ordnance Survey mapping of 1837, and again on the revised 25-inch edition of 1913, by which point a planted area had already begun to encroach from the north-west. A field survey carried out in 1980 recorded the monument in considerable detail. The inner bank, built of earth and stone with possible traces of stone facing on its southern inner edge, survives best along its western and northern arc, where it is accompanied by a fosse, the wide defensive ditch that separates it from the outer bank, that is wide and deep. The fosse becomes shallower as it curves around to the east and south. There is a partially stone-faced entrance gap, about three metres wide, in the inner bank at the south-east, with a causeway across the fosse that rises to a maximum height of 0.7 metres. The interior is nearly level, rising only slightly toward the centre, and carries a scattering of small humps and depressions near its edges. Running almost the full width of the interior, a long shallow trench, around 1.5 metres wide and 15 centimetres deep, cuts across in an east-south-east to west-north-west direction. Local tradition holds that this was dug as an exploratory trial trench at some point, and the open cut revealed loose stone and rock beneath the sod, along with a narrow section of in-situ paving stone near its western end, roughly 1.1 metres across, lying just below the surface. Modern field banks have since clipped one edge of the monument, curving across the northern perimeter and removing a small portion from the overall circuit, a quiet encroachment that is visible on older maps as well as on recent aerial photography.