The site is known locally as Lisfadda, or Lios Fada in Irish, meaning "long fort", a name that hints at either the shape of the enclosure or some quality of it that was noticed and passed down long after the structure itself fell into disuse.

The earthwork belongs to the class of monument known as a rath, a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and, originally, an external ditch. Raths were built and occupied primarily during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and served as enclosed farmsteads for families of some local standing. This example sits in gently sloping pastureland that runs westward towards the Glasheencockusuck stream, north of Macgillycuddy's Reeks. The surviving bank still reaches an external height of around two metres, with a basal width of 3.3 metres, which gives a reasonable sense of its original bulk, though the interior has been levelled to the east of the field boundary and the rest is heavily overgrown. The internal diameter runs to approximately 35 metres on the northwest to southeast axis. What the interior once contained, whether a timber house, storage pits, or other features, is not visible from the surface now.