Centuries ago it would have been a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, one of the circular earthen enclosures that served as the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland. Typically defined by one or more raised banks and ditches, raths were the basic unit of rural life across the country for roughly a thousand years, and tens of thousands of them survive in various states of preservation. This one does not. Whatever earthworks once defined the enclosure have been absorbed entirely into the surrounding pasture.

The site appears on the Ordnance Survey map of 1842 as a circular enclosure, which means that at some point in the nineteenth century there was still enough visible on the ground, or in the landscape's memory, for surveyors to record it. That record is now among the more important things keeping the site in any kind of historical conversation, because the field itself offers no visible surface trace. The slope commands an extensive view to the north, the kind of elevated, outward-looking position that was commonly favoured when these enclosures were first laid out, offering both practical oversight of the surrounding land and a degree of natural advantage in the terrain.