That is a quietly remarkable state of affairs for a structure that may be well over a thousand years old, and it says something about how thoroughly the Irish landscape can absorb its own archaeology.

The site is classified as a univallate rath, meaning a roughly circular enclosure defined by a single earthen bank and ditch. Raths of this type were built predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and functioned as farmsteads or defended homesteads for farming families. Tens of thousands once existed across Ireland, though many have been levelled by centuries of agriculture. This one in Gullane survived the plough, but vegetation has claimed it so completely that surveyors working from C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, could not take detailed measurements of the earthworks beneath the overgrowth.