It is the kind of feature that a casual walker might read as a natural rise, yet its dimensions and the logic of its layout tell a different story. This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a class of enclosed farmstead typically dating to the early medieval period, roughly the sixth to tenth centuries. Thousands of raths survive across Ireland in various states of preservation, but each one occupied a specific piece of ground for specific reasons, and the choice of this particular drumlin crest, commanding a view down a southward slope, was almost certainly deliberate.

The earthen bank that defines the enclosure is best preserved on its north-western arc, where the base still measures five and a half metres wide and the outer face rises to about a metre in height. Elsewhere the bank has been reduced to little more than a scarp, a low, eroded edge in the ground. Traces of an external fosse, a defensive ditch, survive on the north-east and south-east sides, and there is an outer drain running from the south-west to the north-west. Two gaps interrupt the circuit at the south-south-west and west-north-west, but neither is original; the genuine entrance, four metres wide at the base, faces east-south-east. That orientation is common among Irish ringforts and may reflect both practical and symbolic preferences. What gives this particular site an additional point of interest is its appearance on McCrea's map of County Monaghan, published in 1793, meaning it was already a recognised landmark, or at least a mappable feature, more than two centuries ago, long before modern archaeological survey caught up with it.