The tree is said to be the last survivor of an orchard that once occupied the interior of this rath, a ringfort of the kind built across early medieval Ireland as an enclosed farmstead or place of status. The combination is oddly domestic: ancient monument, kitchen garden, one stubborn tree.

The rath itself sits on a north-east-facing slope, its roughly circular enclosure measuring 28 metres in diameter. The earthen bank that defines it varies considerably depending on which arc you are looking at. On the northern to south-eastern side it is a substantial feature, standing 1.8 metres on the exterior face, though it has been worn nearly flush on the interior. Elsewhere the enclosure is shaped partly by a landscaped bank and partly by a natural scarp, suggesting the builders worked with the hillside rather than against it. The north-eastern portion of the interior has been raised by about 1.7 metres to level out the slope, a practical piece of earthmoving that still reads clearly in the ground today. A 19th-century wall was added along the eastern to south-eastern edge to retain the bank, and small stone steps are set into the exterior face at the north-east. Gaps in the bank at the south-east, south-west, and north are probably original or later entrances. Beneath a pile of logs in the north-eastern quadrant lies the opening to a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind often associated with early medieval ringforts and used variously for storage, refuge, or both. Captain D. B. O'Connell noted the site in the 1930s, identifying it as one of two raths lying roughly 549 metres south of Owgarriff Bridge.