A ringfort, or rath, once occupied this position with wide views sweeping south, east, and west, the kind of commanding prospect that early medieval farmers and landholders specifically sought when choosing where to build. Raths were earthen enclosures, typically circular or near-circular, formed by one or more banks and ditches and used as defended farmsteads throughout the first millennium and into the early medieval period. This one measured roughly thirty metres across on its north-south axis and twenty-five metres east to west. Today, that geometry has been almost entirely erased.

The site was still visible and considered notable enough to be annotated on the 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan as simply 'fort', and the corresponding six-inch map edition of the same year showed a clear sub-circular earthwork. Sometime after that record was made, the enclosure was levelled, leaving only a short segment of a wide, shallow fosse at the southern edge. A fosse is the ditch component of such an earthwork, typically dug to provide material for the surrounding bank. That single surviving arc of ditch is the only physical evidence that the site existed at all. Even that subtlety required aerial photography to confirm: a faint crop mark, visible on a Digital Globe image taken in November 2011, traces the ghost of the old enclosure beneath the ground. Crop marks form when buried features affect the soil's moisture or depth in ways that show up in aerial photographs as variations in the colour or growth rate of vegetation above.