The structure is almost certainly a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically built between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, in which a circular bank and ditch marked out a defended homestead for a farming family of some standing. What makes this particular example quietly odd is that it was later adapted and absorbed into the designed landscape of a nearby country house, repackaged as an ornamental feature rather than left alone as an ancient monument.

The earthwork sits approximately 330 metres west of Doory House, and by 1837, when the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was compiled, the site was already occupied by a large tree plantation, the kind of deliberate planting that Georgian and Victorian landowners used to dress up their demesnes with picturesque character. That plantation almost certainly obscured and modified the original monument, which now survives as a raised circular area measuring roughly 45 metres on its northwest-to-southeast axis and 36 metres across. Its defining features include a scarp about a metre high, a fosse (a ditch) roughly 3.8 metres wide, and traces of a low outer bank and a second, narrower outer fosse to the northwest and northeast. No original entrance can now be identified. Within the interior, there are traces of what may be a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically used in early medieval Ireland for storage or as a place of refuge.

The layering here is what gives the site its particular interest: an early medieval enclosure, reinterpreted centuries later as a picturesque garden feature, and now read back again as the ancient monument it probably always was beneath the trees.