The southern gateway of this early medieval earthwork near Ballynagree, about six metres wide and once the only formal way in or out, is now blocked by a stone wall, leaving the enclosure sealed against visitors, livestock, and perhaps curiosity in equal measure. That small act of closure is one of the more quietly puzzling details about a site that has otherwise been left largely to itself, slowly disappearing beneath vegetation on a south-east-facing slope above the River Laney.

The structure is a rath, the most common monument type surviving in the Irish countryside. Raths are ringforts, roughly circular enclosures defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built and occupied primarily during the early medieval period, between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. They served as farmsteads and status symbols for farming families across the island. This particular example measures approximately thirty metres in diameter, enclosed by an earthen bank that still stands about 1.6 metres high on the interior. In places, the bank retains traces of stone facing on its inner face, a detail suggesting some care was taken in its original construction. The external fosse, a defensive ditch that would once have run around the outer perimeter, survives to a depth of around a metre on the north-western arc, though it has not fared as well elsewhere. The interior itself is overgrown, as is much of the bank, which makes reading the full extent of the earthwork difficult from ground level.