What makes it quietly puzzling is precisely its scale: roughly 170 metres along its north-west to south-east axis and 150 metres across, it is far bigger than the ringforts that pepper the Irish countryside, and its boundaries work in two quite different ways depending on which side you approach from.

An enclosure of this kind is a broad category in Irish archaeology, essentially any defined area set apart from its surroundings by an artificial boundary, though the purpose can range from settlement and agriculture to ritual use. Here, the north-western and north-eastern sides are marked by a low earth and stone bank, between two and two-and-a-half metres wide and only about half a metre high, so not a defensive rampart in any serious sense. The southern side, however, dispenses with built structure altogether and relies instead on the natural drama of the gully, where the ground drops away in a steep scarp of around one metre. Whoever laid this out was working with the landscape rather than against it, using Lobawn Brook's cutting as a ready-made boundary and banking up the more open ground to the north and east. Whether the enclosure was ever associated with farming, with a settlement, or with something less easily categorised is not recorded; the site sits in forestry now, its interior largely obscured, its bank modest enough to be easily missed.