The form is that of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the most common type of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century. Most were farmsteads, their banks and ditches defining a defended domestic space rather than anything we would recognise today as a fortress. This one measures 31 metres across on its northwest to southeast axis, modest in scale but coherent enough in plan to read as a deliberate enclosure rather than a trick of the land.

What survives is uneven. The earth and stone bank stands to about a metre in height along the northwestern to south-southeastern arc, but elsewhere it has been levelled to little more than an undulation in the turf, the kind of feature that a plough or a generation of grazing cattle can reduce to near-invisibility. Outside the bank there was once a fosse, a surrounding ditch, which is the standard accompaniment to a rath of this type. Most of that ditch has been filled in, but a section running from the northwest around to the north-northeast remains open, and here the original cut into shale bedrock is still visible, a detail that gives some sense of the labour involved in its construction and of the geology that underlies this corner of west Cork.