A rath, as this type of monument is known, is an early medieval enclosed farmstead, typically circular and defined by an earthen bank and outer ditch. Most were built roughly between the fifth and tenth centuries, and Ireland has tens of thousands of them. What keeps this one from becoming unremarkable is the detail of what survives and what has happened inside its boundary.

The enclosure measures approximately 38 metres east to west and 36 metres north to south, making it a reasonably sized example of the type. The defining bank still stands to about 1.2 metres in height along its north-north-west to west arc, while elsewhere the boundary survives as a scarp, a sharp change in ground level rather than a built-up earthwork. Outside the bank, a fosse, the technical term for a ditch associated with an enclosure, runs from the west around to the north, reaching a depth of about one metre and best preserved along the west to north-north-west stretch, where a field boundary has helped protect it from agricultural erosion over the centuries. Two gaps interrupt the bank, one to the north at about a metre wide and one to the east, which may represent original entrances or later breaches. Inside the enclosure, cultivation ridges running on a north-south axis cross the interior, suggesting that at some point after the rath's primary use, the enclosed ground was turned over to tillage. This kind of later agricultural reuse is not unusual in Irish ringforts, but it leaves a legible record in the soil, a kind of layering of one era of land use over another.