The outer bank has entirely disappeared from view; it was still visible on Ordnance Survey maps from 1904 and 1936, and was described by Bowman in 1934 as standing around eight feet high, yet at some point between then and the present it was levelled without trace. What remains is a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres across, its earthen bank still intact but heavily overgrown, separated from a modern farmyard on its northern side by a wall, with the fosse, the defensive ditch that would once have run around the outside, partly infilled on that same side.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths or lioses, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their animals. This one carries the Irish name Lios na Giolcaighe, which Bowman translated as "fort of the Broom," a reference likely to the broom plant rather than the household implement. It occupies a gently south-facing slope above the River Lyre, which runs about two hundred and fifty metres away down a steeper drop in the land. The causewayed entrance, a gap in the bank where the fosse was bridged to allow access, faces to the south-southeast and measures four metres wide, which is a reasonably generous opening for a site of this type. The surviving bank still stands to an external height of around 1.4 metres, giving a reasonable impression of the enclosure's original form even as the outer circuit that once amplified its presence has completely vanished into the field.