The raised ground still holds its form well enough to be measured, its interior diameter running to just over 24 metres, but the bank along its north-eastern to south-eastern arc has been quietly conscripted into service as a field boundary, its original purpose folded into the practicalities of later farming.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a type of ringfort, the most numerous class of monument in the Irish countryside. Thousands were built, mostly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and they served as enclosed farmsteads for free farming families. They typically comprised a circular area defined by one or more earthen banks, with a fosse, or ditch, dug to provide the material for those banks, running outside them. The Croley example retains traces of its fosse, though the original entrance has been lost entirely, leaving the circuit without the gap that would once have given it life and direction. What remains is the bank itself, substantial enough to read in the landscape even where it has been repurposed, and the slightly elevated interior platform that marks the space where people once lived and kept their livestock.