A ringfort, or rath, was a circular enclosure used primarily as a farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland, its inhabitants protected by an earthen bank and an outer ditch. Here, that ditch, known as a fosse, has been levelled to the point where it leaves no obvious surface trace, yet the difference in soil moisture and crop growth above its buried outline still marks it out clearly in aerial photographs, producing what archaeologists call a cropmark.

The enclosure measures approximately thirty metres in diameter, a modest but not unusual size for a rath of this type. What makes its present condition particularly telling is the way later land use has carved through it. A field fence running on a north to south axis now bisects the interior, and a second fence, oriented roughly northeast to southwest, has been built directly along the line of the fosse at the northern side of the enclosure. An internal bank, perhaps once a subdivision or a secondary feature within the rath, can also be detected as a cropmark running from the northeast down to the south along the eastern side of that first fence. The site, in other words, has been quietly dismantled and reorganised by successive generations of farming, each new boundary ignoring or inadvertently following the contours of the one before.