The earthwork here, most likely a ringfort, was absorbed into the landscaped demesne of Portloman House sometime after 1700, planted over with trees and rendered effectively invisible as an archaeological site. Cartographers working on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps recorded it simply as an oval tree-plantation, and the revised 1913 edition showed it as partially tree-planted. Not once was it marked as an antiquity on any edition of those maps, only ever acknowledged as a feature of the designed landscape rather than a remnant of earlier settlement.

A ringfort, known in Irish as a rath, is one of the most common early medieval monument types in Ireland, typically consisting of a circular or oval area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or high-status residence. This particular example, sitting at the northern end of its ridge in what is now wet pasture, measures roughly 28 metres east to west and 24 metres north to south. When it was formally described in 1981, only very faint traces survived of an inner bank and a possible outer bank, with a narrow, shallow fosse, or ditch, between them. No entrance feature was identifiable. What the eye cannot easily read on the ground, aerial photography has made legible: a 1971 oblique photograph captured the site clearly as an oval cropmark, a pattern caused by differential plant growth over buried structures, and more recent satellite imagery has confirmed the same outline. The monument sits approximately 240 metres to the southwest of Portloman House, which occupies the same demesne lands.

The site is in wet pasture and there are no specific access arrangements noted, but the cropmark is most legible from the air rather than at ground level. The views from the ridge, northward across the midlands and eastward towards Lough Owel, give some sense of why this elevated position would have been chosen in the first place, commanding the surrounding terrain in a way that remains apparent even now.