Seen from above in aerial photography, the oval tree-lined enclosure reads clearly enough, but on the ground the earthworks that once defined it have been worn down to little more than a steep scarp, a kind of stepped drop in the land where a proper bank once stood. A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically bounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and this one in County Westmeath has the added distinction of a possible souterrain, an underground passage or chamber associated with such settlements, lying roughly 82 metres to the north-west.

The 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the monument as a circular-shaped ringfort, a tidy rendering that reflects how such features were understood at the time. By the revised 1913 edition of the OS twenty-five-inch map, the picture had grown more ambiguous: the platform is shown as a slightly distorted, roughly D-shaped form, approximately 50 metres along its north-east to south-west axis and 37 metres across. When the monument was examined and described in 1971, the measurements came in at 41 metres by 36 metres, and the condition was already poor. The earthen bank had been largely reduced to a scarp, with the best-preserved section surviving at the south-east. Where the bank still stood to any height, there was evidence of internal stone facing, suggesting the original construction was more substantial than what now remains. The faint traces of an external fosse, the shallow ditch that would have run outside the bank, were still detectable along the eastern and southern arc. No entrance feature was visible by that point, and the interior showed faint traces of cultivation ridge, hinting at agricultural use within the enclosure at some stage after its original function had long passed. A hill rises to the south-east, looking down over the whole site, giving the place a slightly overseen quality that the early medieval occupants would have known as well as anyone.