What makes this particular site quietly interesting is precisely how much it has dissolved back into the landscape. The banks survive to a maximum height of just 0.4 metres, and in places they have been worn down to little more than a scarp in the ground, a faint ridge that the eye has to be trained to read. It appears on the 1916 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked with hachures, the short radiating lines surveyors used to indicate a raised or embanked feature, and was catalogued in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, where its character was considered ambiguous enough to classify it simply as an enclosure rather than a definitive ringfort.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically a circular or oval area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead and to protect livestock. This example at Lickeen is oval, measuring roughly 44 metres north to south and 39.5 metres east to west. Its layout is more complex than a single bank, comprising an inner bank, a flat berm (the level strip of ground between the two banks, here widest at the north-north-west at 3.5 metres), and an outer bank beyond that. At the northern side, where the outer bank is best preserved, there appears to be a causeway, though its eastern portion has been cut through by a later field boundary, leaving the entrance arrangement incomplete and speculative. That same process of later agricultural use has further altered the interior: two parallel field boundaries running north to south create a narrow strip, between three and seven metres wide, now planted with trees.

The site sits on sloping ground with open views southward across the lough, though higher ground closes in on the other sides, which would have limited its visibility from a distance. The rough grazing around it has not been cleared, which has both preserved the earthworks from ploughing and made them harder to distinguish from the surrounding terrain.