The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was typically a circular or subcircular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period. This one, sitting above open ground with bog visible to the north-east, is not especially imposing today, but the local name suggests it remained a point of reference in the landscape long after its original purpose was forgotten.

The enclosure measures roughly 35 metres east to west and 33 metres north to south, making it a fairly modest example of the type. What survives of the original earthwork consists of two banks with an intervening fosse, the fosse being the ditch dug between or outside the banks, and these features are best preserved along the south-western to north-western arc of the monument. Elsewhere the enclosure survives only as a scarp, a sloped edge in the ground where the bank has been largely lost. A field bank cuts across the monument at the north-east and south-east, the kind of later agricultural boundary that regularly bisects older earthworks as land was divided and reworked across the centuries. The name Bourke's Fort appears in a 1914 source credited to Neary, suggesting the local association was already well established by that point, though whether any particular Bourke family connection underlies the name or whether it simply attached itself to a prominent feature on a family's land is not recorded.