The oval outline, visible on aerial photography as a dark crown of vegetation, belongs to a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that once dotted the landscape in its thousands during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. What makes this particular example quietly arresting is how much of its story can still be read in the ground, even after considerable damage.

When the site was examined in the 1970s, surveyors recorded a roughly circular enclosure approximately twenty-nine metres in diameter, defined by an earthen bank and an external fosse, the ditch dug outside the bank to reinforce the boundary. By that point the monument had already been substantially disturbed. A large quarry hole had eaten into the south-western arc of the bank and pushed through the interior almost to its centre, removing much of the earthwork on that side and reducing what remained in places to little more than a scarp, a low slope rather than a proper bank. The fosse itself survives only as a slight depression visible from the north and north-north-east. Despite all of this, the original entrance is still legible: a gap in the north-eastern bank, just over three metres wide at the top and narrowing to a little over a metre at the base, with a causeway spanning the fosse in front of it. That causeway, roughly four and a half metres wide overall and only about thirty centimetres high, is a modest but real survival. At the centre of the interior, where the ground rises slightly, two conjoined hut sites remain, the footprints of the structures that once made this an inhabited place rather than simply a boundary.