What makes it unusual is not its age or its setting but the degree to which later land use has left its marks alongside the earlier ones, producing a site where early medieval enclosure and nineteenth-century lime-burning overlap in the same bank.

The fort is bivallate, meaning it was defended by two concentric circuits rather than one. A roughly circular interior, measuring around 23 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west, sits within an inner bank of earth and stone, a wide U-shaped fosse (that is, a ditch, roughly 2.8 metres across and 1.7 metres deep), and a lower outer bank beyond that. The proportions are precise enough that the structure must once have been an imposing presence on its modest ridge. What complicates the picture is what happened in the western quadrant. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1840, shows a lime kiln in that area, and the damage to the inner bank there corresponds exactly to what quarrying for such a kiln would cause. A lime kiln was a stone-built structure used to burn limestone and produce quicklime for agricultural use, and the raw material would have been extracted from whatever was close to hand, including a convenient ancient earthwork. By the time the 1906 edition of the same map was produced, the disturbance was already recorded and visible. The outer bank in the south-west quadrant has been partially flattened, the fosse filled in to the north-west, and the southern face of the outer bank cut back, exposing large stones within. In the south-east quadrant, a gap of around 1.2 metres in the outer bank, combined with a short earthen bank running east to west toward the monument, may represent an original entrance, though the absence of a causeway across the fosse at that point leaves the question open. Traces of lazy beds, the ridged cultivation strips associated with pre-Famine subsistence farming, survive in the grass-covered interior, adding another layer to the site's long afterlife as a working piece of ground.