The word moat suggested something medieval and defensive, a Norman imposition, when in fact what they were recording was almost certainly far older, a rath of the early medieval Irish period, most likely dating from somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Ringforts of this kind served as enclosed farmsteads, the bank and outer fosse, or ditch, forming a boundary around a family's dwelling and livestock rather than a fortification in the military sense.

The earthwork sits on a natural rise in gently undulating land, with open views in all directions, the kind of position that would have made practical sense for anyone keeping watch over pasture or tracking the approach of visitors. The oval enclosure measures roughly 73 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and 56 metres across, making it a substantial example of the type. By 1970, when the monument was formally described, the enclosing bank was already in uneven condition: well preserved along the northern, eastern, and southern arc, but worn down to the level of the interior along the western and northern stretch. The outer fosse survives as a wide, shallow depression on the northeast through to the southwest. No original entrance is traceable, though small modern gaps have appeared at the northeast and west-southwest. At the southwest quadrant there is a possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind sometimes used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge. Modern field fences cut across the bank at the southwest and northeast, the ordinary agricultural logic of later centuries gradually overlapping a structure that preceded it by perhaps a thousand years. Today the whole thing is cloaked in trees, recognisable on aerial photography as a low, wooded mound holding its oval outline quietly against the surrounding fields.