Enclosed by a low earthen bank, it is the kind of feature that passes unnoticed at ground level, the slight rise of the bank easily mistaken for a natural undulation in damp pasture. It is only from the air, as aerial photographs from 2005 confirm, that the outline resolves itself into something deliberate and geometric, a shape that human hands put there.

The earthwork is thought to be the remains of a ring-barrow, a funerary monument of the kind built across Ireland and Britain during the Bronze Age and into the early medieval period. Ring-barrows typically consist of a central burial mound or flat area enclosed by a circular bank and sometimes a ditch, marking the interment of one or more individuals. Their proximity to later Christian burial grounds is not unusual; early church sites in Ireland frequently absorbed or settled near pre-existing sacred or ancestral landscapes, and the graveyard immediately to the north may reflect just such a continuity. Alongside the possible barrow, a low linear earthwork extends eastward from the graveyard towards Noughaval House, and is thought to represent the line of an old trackway connecting the two sites, a faint crease in the land suggesting long-established movement between them.