Today, only faint undulations in the pasture at the base of Slievenamon, County Tipperary, hint that something once stood here. The field boundaries that once ran in from the north, south, east, and west to meet the enclosure are gone too, so the landscape gives almost no frame of reference for what the original site might have looked like.

Circular enclosures of this kind are a common feature of the Irish countryside. They are often the remains of a rath or ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built and used mainly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The earthen bank and internal ditch of such a structure would have defined a domestic space for a farming family and their animals. This particular example sits on a north-facing slope on undulating ground, with a stream running east to west roughly seventy metres to the north; that stream flows eastward to join the Lingaun River. A second enclosure survives about 120 metres to the west, which suggests this was once a broader settled landscape rather than an isolated feature. The fact that both the monument and its associated field boundaries have been levelled is unfortunately not unusual; agricultural improvement across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries removed enormous numbers of such earthworks from the Irish countryside.