A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period as a farmstead and status marker. This one has never been properly opened up, not because it lacks interest, but because the ground it occupies fell outside the boundary of a planned development and so was simply left alone.

The site came to light through geophysical survey and subsequent archaeological testing carried out in the early 1990s. Charles Mount investigated it in 1993 and Eoin Halpin followed in 1994. Geophysical survey works by detecting anomalies in the soil, magnetic or electrical, that hint at buried features without requiring any digging, and it was this method that first suggested something significant lay here. The testing that followed confirmed the feature was real, but because development did not extend to that part of the land, full excavation was never undertaken. The results of both investigations were later published by Eogan and O'Brien in 2005. The site therefore occupies an odd position in the archaeological record: identified, partially characterised, and then set aside.