Locally, people still call it the "lios", the Irish word for an enclosed fort or fairy mound, a name that signals how deeply these sites lodged themselves in folk memory long after their original inhabitants were gone.

The fort takes the form of a roughly circular enclosure, measuring approximately 27 metres east to west, set on a flat-topped hillock and bounded by an earthen bank that reaches a maximum height of 2.7 metres. Ringforts of this type, also known as raths, were the most common settlement form in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as the enclosed farmsteads of farmers or minor lords between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. The bank here runs from the west-northwest around to the east, and the whole structure sits in what is now pasture ground, which has helped preserve it; ploughing is the great enemy of earthworks like this one, and grazed land tends to be far kinder to buried and upstanding archaeology alike.