The covering structure is described as a cloghaun type, a form of dry-stone construction that curves inward to form a domed cap, and it marks the way into a souterrain, one of the stone-lined underground passages and chambers that appear across early medieval Ireland, typically associated with ringforts and thought to have served as places of refuge, storage, or concealment.

Researcher McCarthy, writing in 1977, recorded at least three chambers connected by a passage with a stepped entrance descending into the earth. O'Leary, writing two years earlier in 1975, noted the distinctive beehive-shaped entrance cover, a detail that sets this particular souterrain apart from the more plainly finished examples found elsewhere. The ringfort itself, a roughly circular enclosure of the kind built by farming communities during the early medieval period, sits alongside this underground complex, the two features together forming the kind of layered site that tends to accumulate quietly in the Cork countryside without much ceremony.