When a visitor in 1827 counted its stones, only forty-three remained of what had once been a nearly complete ring measuring roughly 39.6 metres across. The rest had been carted off or disturbed, and a recently dug ditch had broken into the northern side. What stands today, 113 upright stones forming an almost perfect circle with an internal diameter of 45.7 metres, is partly the product of a restoration programme begun around the 1870s, a fact that complicates any reading of the monument but does not diminish it.

The circle is an embanked type, meaning the orthostats, the large upright stones, serve as an internal facing for a wide, flat-topped bank of earth and stone roughly nine metres across and up to two metres high, enclosing a slightly raised interior. The cobbled entrance gap at the east, just one metre wide and flanked by stones standing over two metres tall, is aligned so that the tallest entrance stones correspond with a matching pair on the opposite side of the circle, creating an orientation on the midsummer moon on 24 June. At the south-west, two orthostats whose tops slope inward to form a V-shaped notch have been associated with the early November sunset, the festival of Samhain, as noted by Windle in 1912 and Aubrey Burl in 1995. The heaviest single stone, a large cube set to the north-east known as Rannach Croim Duibh, meaning the prominent black stone, weighs over twenty tons and faces the midsummer sunrise. One of the entrance stones was found in recent years to carry passage-tomb style art, identified by Ken Williams. Seán Ó Ríordáin excavated the site in 1939, recovering around 400 struck stone artefacts, axehead fragments, and pottery spanning the Neolithic, Beaker, and early Bronze Age periods, along with the outlines of five shallow ring ditches beneath the interior surface. A further excavation by Rose Cleary in 2012 used radiocarbon dating on animal bone and charcoal to place the construction of the bank between approximately 3020 and 2574 cal. BC, with Cleary suggesting it may date to as early as 2950 to 2850 BC. The circle does not stand alone; within a short radius lie two further stone circles, a possible portal tomb, a probable court tomb, a standing stone site, a possible megalithic structure known as the Giant's Grave, and a prehistoric trackway called Cladh na Leac.

The site is a designated national monument and sits around 350 metres west of Lough Gur, which itself is well signposted from the R512 between Bruff and Herbertstown. The surrounding landscape is accessible on foot, and the density of monuments in the immediate area rewards a slow circuit rather than a single-site visit. The entrance gap faces east and is most legible when approached from that direction; the cobbling underfoot at the threshold is easy to miss if you come in from the sides. The V-notch stones at the south-west are worth locating separately, as their alignment is only apparent when you stand back far enough to see both tops together. The decorated entrance orthostat carries incised motifs that are subtle in flat light and more visible in low, raking sun.