On the Ordnance Survey map, it appears as Cromwell's Fort, a designation that tends to conjure the Lord Protector and his campaigns through Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century. Yet the structure itself is far older, belonging to a class of monument built throughout Ireland from the early medieval period, typically as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or small community. The Cromwell place name, common enough across the Irish landscape, is almost always a coincidence of local topography or land ownership rather than evidence of any actual Cromwellian presence.

When archaeologist O'Kelly recorded the site in 1942 and 1943, the ringfort was already in a considerable state of collapse. A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, consists of a roughly circular earthen bank, or rampart, enclosing a central living area, with a ditch, known as a fosse, dug around the outside to provide both the material for the bank and a degree of defensive depth. At this particular site, the bank had by then fallen inwards and outwards over the centuries, filling much of the fosse and reshaping the interior into a distinctive bowl. O'Kelly noted that the lowest point of that interior still sits above the surrounding field level, and that a ramp rises through the original entrance on the south-east side. The bank itself reaches 3.6 metres above field level in places and runs between 3 and 4.5 metres thick at its base. The overall diameter of the monument measures approximately 45 metres. One detail that caught O'Kelly's attention was a length of berm, a flat shelf of ground between the bank and the fosse, visible on the east side only, with no equivalent elsewhere around the circuit.

The outline of the monument remains clearly legible in aerial photography, which is often the most useful way to appreciate a site whose ground-level details have been softened by centuries of erosion. Visitors approaching on foot should look for the subtle rise of the surviving bank above the surrounding farmland and the slight depression of the bowl-shaped interior. The south-east entrance, though reduced by collapse, gives a sense of the original approach into the enclosure. Aerial images, freely available through mapping tools, reward a close look before any visit, as they reveal the geometry of the earthwork in a way that the view from field level does not always make obvious.