The trees press in on all sides, but this small clearing, measuring around 26 metres east to west and 23 metres north to south, has been spared. The reason is that it is not simply a clearing. It is a rath, or ringfort, an early medieval enclosure of the kind once used as a farmstead and dwelling place, typically by a single family of some local standing. Thousands survive across Ireland, and this is one of the quieter, less-visited examples.

The rath sits at the eastern end of a low rise in the landscape, a position that would have offered modest elevation and perhaps a view across the surrounding ground before the conifers arrived. Its boundary is formed by an earthen bank, between three and four metres wide, which survives to a height of around a metre on its outer face. Beyond that bank, on the northern and north-north-western sides, there is an outer fosse, a shallow defensive or drainage ditch roughly three and a half to four metres across at the top. Where the fosse does not run, the perimeter is defined by a natural or man-made scarp rising about a metre. The entrance gap, three metres wide, faces to the northeast, a common enough orientation for ringforts across the country. The interior is grass-covered and has remained so, making it legible as a structure even in the middle of commercial forestry that might otherwise have obliterated all trace of it.