The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which is essentially a circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and, in many cases, an outer ditch. These were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, home to a single family and their livestock, and they survive in their thousands across the country, though most have been so reduced by ploughing and land clearance that little is obvious to the casual eye. This one retains enough of its original form to read clearly in the landscape.

The enclosure measures roughly 42 metres across in both directions, making it a reasonably substantial example of the type. Its defining earthen bank still stands around 0.9 metres high, and an external fosse, a defensive ditch dug around the outer face of the bank, survives to a depth of 0.4 metres along the south-west to east-south-east arc. A gap of about 1.8 metres in the eastern bank most likely marks the original entrance. Inside, the ground is crossed by cultivation ridges running on a north-south axis, the faint corrugations left by generations of lazy-bed or ridge-and-furrow farming, suggesting the interior was put to agricultural use long after the ringfort itself had fallen out of use as a settlement. Most intriguingly, in the southern quadrant there is a circular hut site measuring just under ten metres by just under eight, the footprint of a structure that would once have been a domestic space, a place where people cooked, slept, and sheltered from a West Cork winter.

The site sits in open pasture on high ground, so the earthworks are most legible in low, raking light, particularly in the early morning or late afternoon in spring and autumn when shadows sharpen the ridges and the bank resolves more clearly against the grass. The cultivation ridges inside are subtle and easier to make out when the growth is short.