It traces the arc of a much older boundary, one that pre-dates the houses alongside it by centuries, possibly millennia.

The site is a roughly circular enclosure, approximately fifty metres in diameter, of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland. Such enclosures, often called ringforts or raths depending on their construction, were typically the enclosed farmsteads of farming families, their banks and ditches marking out a defended domestic space. This particular example sits on a very gentle north-east-facing slope, and for most of its existence it would have read clearly in the landscape as a low earthen bank describing a full circle. By the time the Ordnance Survey recorded the area in its 1906 edition, the bank along the north-western to north-eastern arc had already been absorbed into a curving field boundary, around five metres wide and standing to about one and a half metres in height, though the circular logic of it was still legible on the map. What finished the monument off more decisively was suburban development in the 1980s, when houses were built along the north-east side of a nearby road, with their rear gardens eating into the site and removing the south-western quadrant entirely. A low scarp survives along the south-eastern quadrant, a slight change in ground level that most people walking past would never register as anything other than an uneven lawn edge.