The site, sitting on a natural hillock with open views in most directions, measures roughly 38.5 metres north-northeast to south-southwest, which puts it at the larger end of the ringfort scale. A ringfort, or rath, is an earthen enclosure, typically circular, defined by one or more banks and ditches, used as a farmstead and place of shelter during the early medieval period in Ireland. This one was originally defined by an inner bank, an intervening fosse (that is, a ditch), and an outer bank, a three-part defensive arrangement that would once have presented a serious obstacle to anyone approaching uninvited.

By the time surveyors first mapped it carefully in 1837, it appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet as a circular area about 33 metres across, the bank still holding its shape and ringed on the outside by a line of trees. The Irishtown River runs roughly 140 metres to the northeast. Observers who examined the site on the ground in 1975 found the bank reduced largely to a steep scarp, covered over with thorn bushes and briars, the fosse only faintly visible. A more detailed inspection in 1980 found conditions considerably worse. Land reclamation works had defaced much of the outer bank and partially filled the fosse with dumped boulders. The inner bank survived only in fragments, though those fragments, running from north-northeast to east, retained some evidence of internal and external stone facing, suggesting the earthwork had once been reinforced or revetted with stonework. No entrance was identified on either occasion. The interior had been extensively disturbed, with a large depression to the south and southeast and smaller diggings across the northern, eastern, and southern quadrants, the kind of pitting that can follow agricultural drainage, casual digging, or simply the slow collapse of an unprotected monument.

The field surrounding the site has since been drained and planted with forestry, changes recorded in satellite imagery from 2017. The result is a monument already compromised by land works now further isolated within a changed landscape, the hillock that once gave it strategic command of the surrounding lowlands increasingly obscured by the new tree cover growing up around it.