It is the remains of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement in Ireland. These were typically circular enclosures defined by a bank and ditch, used as farmsteads by families of some local standing between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. This one is modest in scale, with an original diameter of around twenty-five metres, and the western side of the enclosure has been shaped as much by the natural landscape as by human effort, with rock outcrop taking the place of a constructed boundary.

What survives today is an arc of earthen bank, about 0.9 metres high, running from the north-north-east around to the east. The rest of the circuit has largely disappeared, though the rocky ground to the west may have served a practical purpose for whoever built the enclosure, offering a ready-made barrier without the labour of raising an earthwork. A laneway runs along the northern edge of the site, which may reflect a much older pattern of movement through the landscape, local tracks having a tendency to persist long after the structures they once served are forgotten. The surrounding land is hilly rough grazing, broken by outcropping rock, the kind of terrain that makes County Cork's interior feel genuinely ancient even without any visible archaeology at all.