That early map marks it as a "fort", rendered in the gothic lettering the surveyors reserved for antiquities, and records a field bank defining an enclosure roughly 35 metres in external diameter. The bank has since been ploughed almost entirely away, leaving only a faint trace along the northern edge.

A rath, to use the more precise term, is a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built in early medieval Ireland, typically between the sixth and tenth centuries, using an earthen bank and external ditch to define a domestic space rather than a military one. The gothic lettering on the Ordnance Survey maps was a deliberate convention, a way of flagging that a feature was understood to be ancient even when its original function was uncertain. Here the surveyors saw enough to mark it, though centuries of agriculture have reduced what they recorded to almost nothing. A second rath survives about 170 metres to the south-south-west, which suggests that this particular drumlin, a low oval hill shaped by glacial action, once supported more than one enclosed settlement, a pattern not unusual in Monaghan's drumlin landscape where such sites cluster on slightly elevated, well-drained ground.