The oval bank and ditch sitting on this gentle rise in County Westmeath began as a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that dots the Irish countryside in its thousands, built sometime in the early medieval period. It was later repurposed as a burial ground. And then, in 1990, the proposed route of the Mullingar bypass threatened to cut through its eastern half entirely, which is the reason we know as much about it as we do.

Archaeologist V. J. Keeley excavated the site across two seasons, in 1990 and 1991, before road construction destroyed that eastern portion. What she found was a monument of considerable complexity. The bank, composed of boulder clay mixed with charcoal and fragmentary animal bone, stood up to 2 metres high on its western side. It was enclosed by an outer ditch reaching 1.8 metres deep, and a second inner ditch that appeared to post-date the original structure. Near the northern bank, a metalworking area came to light, including a bowl furnace and associated pits, with crucible fragments, iron slag, and vitreous material recovered from the fill. Fourteen burials were eventually uncovered, most of them formal extended inhumations aligned east-west with the head placed at the west, a pattern consistent with Christian burial practice. Several of the graves were outlined by stones. Two of the burials departed from this orderly arrangement: one was a young adult female placed in a pit too shallow to properly contain her, her knees slightly flexed and her head turned to the side; another was an adult female buried face downward. A child found in the inner ditch may, skeletal analysis suggested, have fallen or been thrown in rather than been formally interred. Two children were buried simultaneously within the monument, their skeletons lying face to face with their skulls touching. Among the other finds were bronze rings, a bracelet, iron knives, and an iron leather scorer, a small tool used for marking or cutting leather.

Today only the western half of the earthwork survives, the eastern portion lost to the road that prompted its excavation. What remains is visible as a roughly semicircular shrub-lined bank, bisected on one side by the N52 and on the other by a slip road onto the N4, a monument that now exists in halves, straddling the infrastructure that saved it from disappearing entirely unrecorded.