That impenetrability is, in its way, the point. Beneath and within the scrub lie the probable remains of a rath, the kind of circular earthwork enclosure, typically defined by a bank and ditch, that was a common unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland. What makes this one quietly odd is the way the landscape has grown around it rather than simply absorbing it. Field boundaries radiate outwards from the thicket in five directions, like spokes from a hub, suggesting that farmers working the land in subsequent centuries treated whatever was here as a fixed point, organising their walls around it rather than through it.

The enclosure does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, which means it had either already lost its visible form by that date or was simply not recorded. By the 1922 edition it is marked as a polygonal enclosure, roughly 25 metres east to west and about 30 metres north to south, already folded into the surrounding field system. On the ground today, the clearest surviving evidence is an arc of low bank or scarp visible at the south-east, with a field wall running along the outer edge of the slope and mirroring its curve. That same wall appears to continue around the north-east arc as well, which raises the possibility that a ring of later field walls was built directly over or alongside the circuit of an older enclosure. Inside, three metres north of the scarp, there is a short length of stone bank or wall, about a metre wide and between 30 and 60 centimetres high, whose purpose remains uncertain. A second rath sits approximately 50 metres to the north-east, meaning this corner of Mayo may preserve traces of two early enclosures in close proximity, one reasonably legible, the other now little more than a tangle of thorns holding its shape against the field.