It is the kind of place that could easily be walked past without a second thought, yet the local Irish name attached to it, Ríoch na cathar, gestures at something older and more considered. The word cathar in Irish place names typically refers to a stone fort or enclosed settlement, and that folk memory of a more significant structure may well be preserving knowledge the landscape itself no longer makes obvious.

The enclosure's defining earthen bank, standing only about 0.7 metres high today, runs from the north-northeast around to the southeast, where the line of a stream takes over, and a field fence completes the circuit back to the north. This patchwork of natural and constructed boundaries is not unusual for early enclosures in Ireland, where water features were routinely incorporated into defensive or agricultural layouts. What adds another layer to the site is the presence of lazybeds crossing the interior on a north-south axis. Lazybeds, the parallel ridges thrown up by hand cultivation, are closely associated with post-medieval subsistence farming and reached their greatest intensity in the centuries leading up to the Famine of the 1840s. Their presence inside the enclosure suggests the space was pressed into agricultural use long after whatever original purpose it served had been forgotten, the old boundaries simply becoming convenient walls for a later generation of smallholders working the hillside.