The enclosure, roughly fifty metres across, is defended by two quite different stretches of bank that meet and diverge as they trace a circle through working farmland. On the SSE-to-NNW arc the bank has worn down to about 0.7 metres, a low ridge that a person could step over without much effort. On the opposite arc, running NNW back to SSE, the bank rises to 1.5 metres and is stone-faced, its inner revetment still holding the earthen core in place after perhaps a thousand years or more of tillage pressing in around it.

A rath, as ringforts of this earthen-banked type are generally known, was the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth century. Most were farmsteads rather than forts in any military sense, the enclosing bank and its accompanying ditch serving to mark territory, contain livestock, and signal the status of whoever lived within. The variation in construction visible here, one side carefully stone-faced and the other allowed to slump, might reflect phased building, repair, or simply the practical logic of a slope: the more exposed or load-bearing northern arc received the more deliberate finish, while the southern stretch was left as compacted earth. That the site survives at all within actively tilled ground is notable; cultivation has been the undoing of countless such monuments across Cork and elsewhere in Ireland.