The earthwork that once occupied a gentle rise in the pastureland south of Lough Owel has been levelled so thoroughly that it now exists primarily as a cropmark, visible only from the air, where differences in soil moisture and root depth betray the outline of something that once stood. That something was roughly 49 metres east to west and 43 metres north to south, a modest but not insignificant enclosure of the kind that would once have been a farmstead or the residence of a local family of some standing in early medieval Ireland.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is essentially a circular or oval enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, built to provide security for a household and its livestock. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation; many do not. By the time the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map was drawn in 1837, this one was still intact enough to show as a circular, tree-lined earthwork, and the OS Fair Plan annotated it simply as a fort. The revised twenty-five-inch map of 1913 records it as a modified suboval shape, suggesting that agricultural pressure had already begun to alter it. When surveyors visited in 1970, they found an almost completely levelled area where only a very slight scarp, no more than 0.35 metres high in places, hinted at where the bank had run. The entrance, wherever it had once faced, was no longer recognisable. Inside, the ground retained gentle humps and hollows, the kind of surface disturbance that earthworks leave behind long after the visible structure has gone. The site commands extensive views in all directions, which is typical; the people who chose this slight rise would have been able to see who or what was approaching across the undulating pasture, with Lough Owel visible just 400 metres to the north.