While Athasselabbey draws attention for its Augustinian priory, founded in the late twelfth century and once among the largest in Ireland, this earthen enclosure a short distance to the north gets on with the business of existing almost entirely unnoticed, swallowed by undergrowth, bushes, and mature trees that have made it effectively impenetrable.

The enclosure is roughly circular, about thirty-five metres in diameter, and defined by an earthen bank. Circular earthworks of this kind are among the most common field monuments in Ireland, generally interpreted as the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead used primarily during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The bank itself is visible in places along its exterior, but the interior has not been accessible for survey. A sub-rectangular earthen field boundary wraps around the whole thing, and the Ordnance Survey six-inch map records the circular form clearly, with older field boundaries radiating outward from the site to the south-east, south-west, and north-west. Those radiating boundaries have since been removed and replaced with electric fencing, so the landscape around the enclosure has changed even as the monument itself has remained locked inside its own dense growth.

The farm track that runs along the western and northern sides of the monument gives the clearest sense of its position, on a low rise of north and east-facing slope, in gently undulating land just north of a farmyard. The electric fencing that now flanks the field boundary means the enclosure remains off-limits to casual visitors, and the vegetation within shows no sign of thinning. What is visible from the track is really just the suggestion of something underneath, a slight swelling in the ground, the outline of a bank beneath decades of accumulated green.