It takes a particular kind of attention to notice it: an oval scarp, barely twelve centimetres high and three metres wide, curving across the slope in a rough arc from east-northeast to northwest. On the opposite side, that arc has been levelled entirely, absorbed into the surrounding field. What remains is less a monument than a faint argument in the soil that something, at some point, was deliberately enclosed here.

Enclosures of this type, roughly oval or circular in plan, appear throughout the Irish landscape in enormous numbers and date from a broad sweep of prehistory and early medieval activity. They served many purposes: farmsteads, ritual sites, burial grounds, cattle pounds. Without excavation it is impossible to say which category this particular example belongs to, and the notes are quiet on the matter. What can be said is that the oval measures approximately twenty-five metres east to west and twenty metres north to south, dimensions consistent with a modest domestic enclosure, the kind of small ringfort or its predecessor that would once have defined the boundary of a family's world. A curvilinear scarp, as seen here, is simply a curved earthen bank or ledge cut into sloping ground, the most basic form such a boundary could take. The gentle westward tilt of the interior matches the slope of the wider hillside, suggesting the enclosure was built to work with the natural lie of the land rather than against it.