Formally, it is classified as a prehistoric or early historic enclosure, the kind of irregular bounded space that appears throughout the Irish landscape and whose original purpose, whether agricultural, domestic, or ritual, is rarely straightforward to establish. Locally, however, it is remembered as something altogether more recent and more sorrowful: a famine burial ground.

The enclosure itself is roughly irregular in plan, stretching approximately 44 metres east to west and up to 36 metres north to south. Its boundaries are not uniform. To the west and north, a stone-faced earthen bank, standing about 0.7 metres high, defines the perimeter, while the eastern side is bounded by a stone wall a little higher at 1.1 metres. The southern bank has been largely levelled, with only a short section surviving at the south-east corner. Inside, the ground falls away gradually toward the east, where an L-shaped area is partly defined by a low scarp. It is a modest, quietly complex piece of ground. The local association with famine burial connects it to the catastrophe of the 1840s, when the Great Famine killed over a million people in Ireland and forced the emigration of at least as many again. Makeshift burial grounds, sometimes called "famine graveyards" or "cilliní," were used across the country during that period, often on the margins of settled land, and the memory of them has persisted in communities long after the physical evidence has become difficult to read.