It looks down over a wide spread of bog on the western side of the Blackwater river valley, and it has been sitting there, uncharted, through every revision of the maps that covered the land around it. That absence is itself a kind of curiosity: structures that predate systematic surveying sometimes slipped through, especially on high, marginal ground that nobody had much reason to measure precisely.

What survives is a layered site, one enclosure built on top of, or at least around, an earlier one. The older structure was a stone-faced bank, circular in plan, with an internal diameter of 13.2 metres, which places it in the scale of a small ringfort or enclosure of early medieval type, though no firm dating is recorded. A ringfort, to use the common term, is typically a circular enclosed settlement defined by an earthen or stone bank, widely built across Ireland from roughly the early centuries of the first millennium into the medieval period. Here, the inner and outer faces of that original bank can only be traced on the east-south-east and west-north-west sides, where the wall thickness measures 1.2 metres. A later, modern circular enclosure was then laid over much the same circuit, and its construction, along with general collapse, has obscured a good deal of the earlier fabric. A rectangular sheepfold, built into the south-western quadrant, adds another layer of practical, workaday use to a site that was clearly still considered a convenient piece of prepared ground long after its original purpose was forgotten. The poorly preserved remains of a second structure sit alongside to the east, though whether it belongs to the same period as the older enclosure is not known.