This is a rath, the most common type of ringfort found across Ireland, typically built during the early medieval period as a farmstead enclosure for a family of some status. What survives here is fragmentary: an earthen bank, a shallow round-bottomed fosse (the ditch that would have run around the outside), and traces of a second outer bank, much of which has been levelled along the south-western, western, and northern sections. Several modern gaps break what remains of the outer ring. The interior itself tilts gently from west-south-west to east-north-east, following the natural lean of the hillside.

The ridge on which it sits runs north-west to south-east, and from this position the ground opens up to the north-east with views towards Lough Derravaragh, the long glacial lake familiar from early Irish mythology as the place where the Children of Lir were said to have spent part of their enchanted exile as swans. Whether the people who built this rath had any particular relationship with the lake or its shores is unknown, but the siting is suggestive of the kind of elevated, outward-looking position that early medieval farming communities often chose, combining defensive awareness with access to productive lowland. Some 540 metres to the south-east lies a separate earthwork, a reminder that this part of Westmeath was once considerably more populated with such enclosures than the present landscape implies.