The feature, roughly 44 metres in diameter, consists of a low bank and an external ditch, with what looks like an entrance gap on the southern side. On the face of it, that description fits a rath, the type of enclosed farmstead built across Ireland from the early medieval period onward, typically by a farming family of some local standing. But context complicates the identification considerably.

The earthwork lies about 110 metres east of Glenacurragh Castle, within the managed landscape immediately surrounding Glenacurragh House. That proximity matters. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, landowners across Ireland and Britain sometimes constructed ornamental earthworks, tree-rings, and decorative enclosures as part of designed demesne landscapes, features intended to give a parkland setting a sense of antiquity or picturesque structure. The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a tree-lined bank on the southern side of the earthwork, which may simply be the enclosing element rendered in the cartographic conventions of the time, or may point toward a deliberately planted feature. By the revised 1888 edition and the 1908 twenty-five-inch map, only the southern half of the earthwork is partially marked with hachures, the short radiating lines mapmakers used to indicate sloping ground or banks. The gradual fading of the feature from the maps suggests either natural deterioration or that surveyors were themselves uncertain what they were looking at. Whether the circular form began as an early medieval enclosure that was later incorporated into a designed landscape, or was constructed wholesale as an ornamental feature, remains an open question.