The earthwork is roughly fifty metres across at its widest point, and the fosse, the encircling ditch that would have reinforced the bank in the structure's working life, is still faintly legible in the landscape, though it now stretches to little more than half a metre in depth. A pond has been dug into the southern section of that ditch at some point, and a field fence cuts across the north-western perimeter, both interventions quietly eroding the original form. Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically used as farmsteads protected by one or more earthen banks and ditches. This one, despite its size, has been considerably levelled.

By 1837, when the Ordnance Survey was producing its detailed Fair Plan maps of the country, the site was already being recorded as an earthwork, annotated simply as "fort". That label suggests the surveyors recognised its antiquity even then, though the monument was clearly no longer intact. The raised sub-circular area that survives today measures roughly forty-six metres north to south and fifty metres east to west, dimensions that would have made it a reasonably large example of the type in its original state. Kilmaglish House stands about 240 metres to the north-west, close enough that the agricultural and domestic history of the surrounding land has almost certainly played a role in the gradual reduction of the earthwork over the centuries.