A rath, as these circular earthwork enclosures are commonly known, was a farmstead of the early medieval period, its banks and ditches marking out a defended homestead rather than any military fortification. This one, roughly fifty metres across, cuts a clear figure on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from 1842, 1904, and 1938, shown each time as a hachured ring, the cartographic shorthand for an earthen bank. By 1975, an aerial photograph still caught it as an upstanding feature. Since then, tillage has done its slow work.

When a researcher named Bowman recorded the site in 1934, it was a more substantial thing. He described a double-ramparted fort on land belonging to a Mrs. O'Callaghan, with a diameter of around forty-five yards. Even then, half the outer rampart had already been levelled, but what remained stood about five feet high. The inner rampart rose to some thirteen feet measured from the base of the fosse, which is the name for the ditch between the two banks, here roughly eighteen feet wide. The interior, Bowman noted, was raised and saucer-shaped, a detail that points to deliberate construction rather than natural variation in the land. The outer bank, visible on the 1842 map to the east of the enclosure, had by the time of later surveys been absorbed into the field boundary system, its archaeological identity quietly dissolved into agricultural infrastructure. That eastern remnant still survives in that form, incorporated into the field fences rather than erased outright, which gives it an odd kind of afterlife, present but unrecognised.