Part of its eastern bank has been pressed into service as a field fence, while disused farm buildings have been constructed directly over where the bank once ran to the north-west. A cairn of dumped stones sits inside the enclosure to the south-east, and further stones lie scattered across the interior. It is, in other words, a site that has been quietly cannibalised over generations, yet enough survives to read the original form clearly.

The earthwork is a rath, the most common type of ringfort in Ireland, a class of monument built predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and used as enclosed farmsteads by farming families of varying social rank. This example sits on a south-facing slope in pasture at Killaclug in mid Cork, a sensible orientation that would have offered shelter and good light to whoever originally settled here. The enclosure is roughly circular, about twenty-five metres in diameter, defined by an earthen bank standing approximately one metre high along the northern and eastern sides, with a lower rise marking the southern edge. The eastern bank retains traces of stone facing in places, suggesting a degree of construction effort that went beyond a simple thrown-up earthwork. That facing, now partly merged with a later field boundary, hints at a site that was once rather more deliberately built than its current battered condition implies.