The Ordnance Survey mapped this feature on both editions of its six-inch map under the name "Cloghaun", a diminutive form of the Irish word for a stone hut of that distinctive corbelled form, and the name stuck even as the vegetation closed in around it.

A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and, often, an outer ditch called a fosse. They were the standard farmstead type of early medieval Ireland, built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. The one at Lisnabrinny sits on a north-west-facing slope and measures approximately forty metres in diameter, with a bank rising to around two and a half metres. There is a possible stone facing on the north-western side of the bank, and an external fosse to the north-east. Beneath it, or at least at its threshold, lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of a kind frequently found associated with ringforts, probably used for storage or as a place of refuge. O'Leary, writing in 1975, described the clochan above the souterrain entrance, though surveyors working from the published Cork inventory were unable to reach the interior of the enclosure due to the density of the overgrowth.

The site remains in pasture, heavily overgrown, and its interior has not been formally examined in recent decades. The clochan described by O'Leary may be partly ruined or obscured, but its presence, combined with the souterrain beneath, suggests this was once a more complex and deliberate arrangement than the earthwork alone implies.