It is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built in their thousands across Ireland during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Most were home to a single farming family of some status, their livestock sheltered within the bank. This one is modest by any measure: around twenty-three metres across at its widest and enclosed by a bank of earth and stone only half a metre high and two and a half metres wide. There is no fosse, the defensive ditch that typically runs outside such a bank, and whatever entrance once existed has long since disappeared.

What makes this particular rath quietly interesting is the way the landscape has absorbed and then discarded it. At some point after it fell out of use, the enclosing bank was pressed into service as a field boundary running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east. That field boundary has itself since been abandoned, leaving the rath in a kind of double obscurity, a forgotten feature swallowed into a forgotten division of land. The stream beside it continues regardless, and the pasture lies flat and unhurried around what remains of the bank.