It is a rath, one of the thousands of ringforts scattered across Ireland, built during the early medieval period as a farmstead enclosure, typically protecting a family's home, livestock, and stores. This one measures roughly 33 metres across on its north-south axis and is defined by an earthen bank still standing to about 1.4 metres in height. What gives it a slightly melancholy quality is the state of its interior, which has become a convenient dumping ground for field clearance material, the stones and uprooted vegetation that accumulate when surrounding land is tidied and worked.

The external fosse, a defensive ditch cut around the outside of the bank, still survives to the north, though it too has been partially filled with stones and cleared bushes over time. A fosse of this kind would originally have reinforced the bank, making the whole enclosure a more formidable barrier. Writing in 1933, the archaeologist Seán P. Ó Ríordáin noted the remains of an outer bank as well, suggesting the site may once have had a more elaborate, multi-phase structure. Ringforts with two concentric banks, known as bivallate raths, were generally associated with higher-status occupants, and even the fragmentary survival of a second bank is worth noting here. Ó Ríordáin's early record places this site within a longer scholarly conversation about Cork's ringfort landscape that stretches back nearly a century.