A rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthwork enclosure used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, once stood here with ramparts reaching ten feet in height. It has since been levelled entirely, leaving no visible surface trace. What endures is only the record of what it once was, and the particular use to which it was put long after its original occupants were gone.

Writing in 1916, the historian Power noted that the site had already been partly destroyed by his time, but retained those considerable earthen banks and carried a local tradition that it had served as a Mass place during the Penal era. The Penal Laws, enforced with varying degrees of severity across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, prohibited Catholic worship and drove priests and congregations into the open air, into barns, and into whatever sheltered or secluded spots the landscape offered. A half-ruined ringfort, set into the ground with high earthen walls screening it from view, would have made a practical and discreet gathering place. The community memory of that use survived the fort itself, which is more than can be said for the earthworks.

The site today offers nothing to the eye, but the layering of histories it represents is quietly remarkable: an early medieval enclosure repurposed, perhaps a thousand years after its construction, as a place of clandestine worship, and now gone altogether except in the written record.