No cartographer marked it, no surveyor noted it in the field. It came to attention only through aerial photography, which revealed what ground-level observation had apparently never caught: a slightly raised oval platform, roughly 33 metres along its north-west to south-east axis and about 25 metres across, sitting on a gentle prominence above the bay.

The form suggests a rath, the most common type of early medieval enclosed farmstead in Ireland, typically circular or oval and defined by an earthen bank with an accompanying external ditch called a fosse. Here, though, there is no fosse, and the original entrance cannot be identified. What does survive along the western to northern arc is a curving field boundary that appears to have been laid out along the line of the earlier bank, effectively absorbing it into the working agricultural landscape. This is a familiar fate for such structures: farmers in later centuries found the ready-made curves of old enclosure banks convenient as field margins, and in incorporating them, inadvertently preserved the outline while obscuring the archaeology. Whether the site is a rath proper or some other form of enclosure remains uncertain; the absence of a ditch and the degree of later disturbance leave the question open.