Sitting in rough pasture at the edge of a break in a north-facing slope at Deshure in County Cork, the ringfort's builders had to work with a hillside rather than against it, raising the northern and north-eastern sections of the interior above the surrounding ground to compensate for the natural gradient. The result is a circular enclosure, roughly 34 metres east to west and 32 metres north to south, that presents a more modest face internally than it does from the outside.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is an early medieval enclosure, typically dating from somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries, formed by a circular earthen bank and used as a farmstead or defended residence. Here, the bank survives most clearly on the western to southern arc, where it stands about one metre above the interior and two metres above the outer ground level. Elsewhere it has softened to little more than a grass-covered rise, as often happens when a site has spent centuries under agricultural use. That agricultural use left its own mark on the interior: the ground is crossed by the remains of cultivation ridges running on a north-east to south-west axis, the faint corrugations of lazy beds or earlier spade tillage, overlaid on a structure that predates them by many centuries. It is a common enough palimpsest in Irish fields, one type of land use quietly written over another.