What makes it quietly odd is not its survival alone, but the way the landscape accommodates it. As far back as the 1840 Ordnance Survey mapping, a field boundary can be seen kinking northward to avoid the monument, a small but telling sign that even then, whoever worked this land respected or at least acknowledged whatever the ring in the ground represented.

This kind of monument is generally understood to be a ringfort, the most common archaeological field monument in Ireland. Ringforts, which served as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, were typically defined by a raised bank and sometimes an outer ditch, or fosse. The Scart enclosure follows this pattern closely. Its broad, flat-topped bank, between 1.8 and 2 metres at the crest and up to 4.2 metres at its base, is accompanied by a flat-bottomed fosse on the south-western to north-western arc. The bank is mainly earthen with some stones worked into it, and it was constructed with a practical eye: the upslope side to the west carries the most substantial bank, compensating for the natural fall of the ground toward the north-east. By the time the 1907 Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced, the circular form was recorded plainly. A large tree once stood near what appears to have been the original entrance on the east-north-east side; only the felled stump base now remains to mark the spot.