A rath, the Irish term for a circular earthen enclosure typically used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, once occupied the crest of this rise, its banks clearly legible enough to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838. By later map editions it had vanished from the cartographic record entirely, levelled into the improved pasture that now covers the hill.

What the levelling could not entirely erase is visible to a careful eye at ground level. The outline of the enclosure, somewhere between thirty and thirty-five metres in diameter, can still be traced through faint undulations in the turf. More convincing is a section running from the south-east around to the south-south-west, where a well-defined scarp survives, and immediately outside it a narrow terrace roughly two to three metres wide. This terrace, bordered on its outer edge by a slight rise and a scarped external slope, may be the last remnant of an original fosse or outer bank, the kind of feature that would have reinforced the defensive or enclosing character of the rath when it was in use. Quarrying has disturbed part of this outer edge, and a farm track has cut deeply into the western side of the hill, clipping the enclosure's edge. A post and wire fence now bisects the eastern half of the interior, the functional boundaries of modern agriculture laid across those of an earlier one.