A roughly circular platform, some 39 metres across, sits on a gentle south-west-facing slope, ringed by a concentric system of banks, ditches, and berms that has endured for well over a thousand years. What makes this particular example quietly arresting is not its grandeur but its layering: two banks of earth and stone, separated by a wide flat berm and their own respective fosses, or ditches, arranged one beyond the other around the raised interior. That kind of doubled enclosure places it among the more elaborately defended ringforts, a class of early medieval farmstead that once numbered in the tens of thousands across Ireland and typically housed a single farming family of some local standing.

The structural detail repays close attention. The inner bank stands only about half a metre above the interior but is nearly four and a half metres wide, with a fosse almost five metres across at its outer foot, then a flat berm of four metres before the second, slightly narrower bank begins. To the west and north-west, this neat geometry breaks down: the inner fosse disappears and the berm becomes impossible to trace, suggesting either later disturbance or uneven original construction on that side. More telling still, the outer bank has been absorbed into a later field boundary running roughly north-east to south-west, the kind of quiet annexation that happened across rural Ireland as agricultural landscapes were reorganised across the post-medieval centuries. The original entrance, if it survives at all, is no longer recognisable as such.

Visitors walking through Hazelwood, which lies along the southern shore of Lough Gill, may pass close to the site without realising what the low undulations in the woodland floor represent. The ash canopy keeps the understorey relatively open, which can actually make the earthworks easier to read in certain lights, particularly in late autumn or winter when ground vegetation has died back and the long shadows of low sun pick out the relief more clearly.