It is easy to overlook: the bank that traces its perimeter stands no higher than a metre at its tallest, runs two to three metres wide, and has been further obscured by field boulders dumped against it at some point in the agricultural past. Yet the shape is there, measuring roughly 29 metres along its north-east to south-west axis and 21 metres across, a deliberately made space that has survived, if only just.

Enclosures of this kind, defined by an earthen or stone bank rather than a wall or ditch, appear throughout the Irish countryside and are notoriously difficult to date without excavation. Many belong to the early medieval period, when enclosed farmsteads, known as raths or ringforts, were a common feature of the landscape. A fosse, the encircling ditch that typically accompanies a rath, is absent here, as is any visible entrance gap, which makes confident classification harder. The name of the townland offers its own quiet layer of interest: Toberpatrick derives from the Irish "tobar", meaning well, and Patrick, suggesting the former presence of a holy well associated with Saint Patrick, a type of site that often attracted early Christian activity and sometimes stood in close relation to settlement enclosures. Whether any connection existed between this enclosure and such a well is unknown, but the pairing of name and monument gives the place an additional quality of accumulated, layered time.