What makes the geometry of this place quietly interesting is the way the site's builders worked with the landscape rather than simply imposing a uniform enclosure upon it. On the southern side, where a steep natural slope drops sharply down to the Drumcliff River just 35 metres below, the earthen bank is almost entirely absent. The cliff edge itself was the defence, and no additional earthwork was needed.

The site is a rath, a type of ringfort that would once have enclosed a farmstead, typically belonging to a family of some local standing in early medieval Ireland. Roughly 39 metres north to south and 42 metres east to west, the enclosure is defined by an earthen bank around 4 metres wide and, where it survives, about half a metre high on the interior face. Outside the bank, on the south-western to south-eastern arc, runs a fosse, the term for a defensive ditch, measuring nearly 6 metres wide. The original entrance can still be identified: a 2-metre gap in the bank at the north-north-west, complete with a causeway crossing the fosse. Several additional breaks in the bank are more recent intrusions, including a ramp cut down into the fosse on the east-north-eastern side, the kind of modification that speaks to centuries of agricultural use long after the site's original purpose was forgotten.