It measures roughly 27 metres across, enclosed by a very low bank with traces of an outer bank and a shallow fosse, the term used for a ditch dug to define or defend an earthen enclosure. That modest profile is precisely what makes it interesting: the monument has long resisted confident classification, sitting uneasily between two categories of prehistoric monument that look, from ground level, remarkably alike.

For some time the site was recorded as a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that appears in enormous numbers across the Irish countryside, typically dating to the early medieval period. But the profile of the earthwork, along with its appearance on aerial photography taken in November 2011, led to the suggestion that it may instead be a ring-barrow, a form of funerary monument generally associated with the Bronze Age, in which a burial mound is surrounded by one or more circular ditches or banks. The distinction matters: one represents a place where people lived, the other a place where the dead were commemorated. The interior here shows faint traces of cultivation ridges, suggesting the ground was worked at some point, while a gap in the outer bank and fosse at the north-north-west may represent an original entrance. A post-1700 field fence cuts across the south-eastern side of the outer bank, a reminder of how later agricultural boundaries have quietly reorganised the landscape around such sites. A ringfort lies roughly 400 metres to the east, making this a corner of Westmeath where the layers of different periods of human settlement sit in close, unannounced proximity.