A fosse is simply a ditch, here just over half a metre deep and a metre wide, dug to accompany the bank that it helped to define. Along the eastern and southern sides, the bank has been worn down to little more than a scarp edge, a step in the ground, with only faint traces of the outer fosse remaining. At the northern end, a later field boundary has been built up against the enclosure, and may actually incorporate part of the original bank into its own fabric.

Enclosures of this type are a familiar but still poorly understood feature of the Irish landscape. Circular earthen enclosures, sometimes called raths or ring-forts depending on their scale and construction, were built throughout the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, though some examples are earlier or later. They served variously as farmstead boundaries, places of status, or enclosures for livestock, and their distribution across Ireland runs into the tens of thousands. This one, sitting on an east-south-east facing slope, would have looked out across lower ground, which was a common orientation choice, likely for shelter and drainage. The measurements here are modest: the bank at its best-preserved point reaches just under a metre in external height, and the overall diameter puts this at the smaller end of the scale for such enclosures.