What may originally have been a ringfort, the circular or oval enclosure type used across early medieval Ireland as a defended farmstead, now reads in the landscape as something altogether more layered: an ancient earthwork that was, at some point in the nineteenth century, deliberately planted with trees and ringed with a second bank, converting it into what is known as a tree-ring.

The original enclosure is oval, measuring roughly 41 metres north to south and 36 metres east to west. Its earth and stone bank has been largely reduced to a scarp over time, but the external fosse, a ditch running around the outside, survives to a width of about five metres and an internal depth of two to three metres. A causewayed entrance, a raised crossing through the ditch roughly two and a half metres wide, sits on the eastern side. It is this entrance that most clearly hints at the site's early medieval origins; such features are characteristic of ringforts across the Irish countryside. The second, better-preserved bank that encircles the fosse is a later addition, dated to the nineteenth century, as is a smaller grove of trees lying immediately to the east. These Victorian-era interventions were not unusual; landowners of that period frequently planted tree-rings on existing earthworks, sometimes for aesthetic reasons and sometimes to mark estate boundaries or provide shelter.

What results is a site where two very different eras of land use have become physically inseparable. The ancient earthwork provided the frame; the nineteenth-century planting filled it. Whether the people who planted those trees understood what lay beneath them is unknown, but the effect is a place where early medieval enclosure and Victorian landscape taste have quietly merged into a single, slightly ambiguous feature on a Tipperary hillside.