These ring-shaped earthworks, common across Ireland, were typically constructed during the early medieval period as enclosed farmsteads, with a bank and sometimes a fosse defining a domestic or agricultural space. What makes this particular example quietly unsettling is not what survives but what has gone: satellite imagery shows that the northern half of the monument has been levelled, leaving only a partial arc to suggest the original form.

The enclosure measures approximately 52 metres in diameter and was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, meaning it was a visible, legible feature of the landscape when surveyors moved through County Kilkenny in the late 1830s. It appeared again on the 1900 revision, still intact enough to map. At some point between that later survey and the present day, the northern portion was lost, most likely to agricultural improvement, a gradual process of ploughing and levelling that has reduced thousands of similar monuments across Ireland to crop marks and faint undulations. The southern arc, however, remains, rising with the hillock it occupies.