Whoever chose this spot on a north-south ridge in County Kilkenny was not working by accident. The ground falls away steeply to the east and north, drops again to the west after a brief rise, and only the southern approach offers anything resembling level ground. The result is a position with commanding views in every direction, which is precisely what you would want if your concerns were defence, surveillance, or simply the daily management of a small agricultural territory.

The structure itself is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen or stone bank, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. This particular example sits on the north-eastern corner of the ridge, occupying a slight rise on what is otherwise a fairly flat summit. The enclosed interior measures around twenty-four metres in diameter, surrounded by a stoney earthen bank about two metres wide overall, narrowing to less than a metre at the crest. The bank stands roughly eighty centimetres high on the exterior and only forty centimetres on the interior side, which is typical of the form. Two entrances survive, one facing west at three metres wide and one facing north-east at three and a half metres, and both are thought to be original rather than later breaches in the bank. The north-eastern entrance in particular would have opened directly onto the steepest and most exposed face of the ridge, which suggests the builders were confident enough in the natural topography to use it as part of their defensive thinking.