It is, in fact, a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead that was common across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period. Tens of thousands were built, and yet each surviving example carries the same quiet insistence that somebody once chose this exact spot to enclose their world within a bank of earth.

This particular rath takes the form of a raised circular area about nineteen metres in diameter, surrounded by a broad earthen bank roughly four and a half metres wide, though it stands only about twenty centimetres above the interior. At its outer foot, on the west-northwest and east-southeast sides, runs a fosse, the shallow ditch that would have been dug to provide the material for the bank itself. That fosse is just under four metres wide and similarly shallow, giving the whole structure a low, almost compressed profile against the slope. The site faces gently westward, set into ground that has been pasture for as long as anyone has recorded it. What complicates the picture is a small quarry cut into the northern arc of the monument, from the north-northwest around to the northeast. The bank on that side has been removed, along with the edge of the interior, and a spoil heap about eight metres across and thirty centimetres high sits immediately to the south of the damage, a minor but permanent alteration to a structure that otherwise survived largely intact for over a thousand years.