The trees follow the course of an earthen-and-stone bank, the defining feature of a rath, a type of ringfort that served as an enclosed farmstead for an early medieval Irish family, most commonly dating from roughly the sixth to the tenth century. The bank here still retains the faint remains of a counterscarp, the secondary ridge thrown up on the outer side of the enclosure, and beyond it a wide, shallow fosse, the ditch that once reinforced the whole perimeter. The interior, gently sloping toward the south-east, holds something that easily escapes notice from a distance: the grass-covered wall footings of a rectangular hut site, a structure that once stood within the protected space of the fort itself.

The monument's recorded history is a study in gradual change and slow erasure. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837 already shows it as a clearly defined circular area, roughly 28 metres north to south and 26.5 metres east to west, sitting within a long narrow field. By the time the revised 25-inch map was produced in 1913, some of the field boundaries to the west had been removed, and the shape was recorded as more oval. A field bank still extends from the monument at the south-east and west, visible on aerial photography, threading across the landscape in the way that later agricultural boundaries so often do around older earthworks, borrowing their edges and slowly absorbing their geometry. When the site was described more closely in 1975, a causewayed entrance was identified at the south-east, where a raised crossing, four metres wide at the top and narrowing to one metre at its base, carries a path across the fosse. A later field bank cuts across the bank and fosse at the north-north-west, and there is a modern gap at the same point, the kind of practical breach that farmers have been making in inconvenient earthworks for centuries.