That clearing marks the footprint of an ancient earthen fort on the north-east-facing slope of a drumlin, one of those smooth, elongated hills formed from glacial debris that give so much of the Irish midlands and north-west their gently rolling character. The platform is about thirty-five metres across and rises to around a metre in height on its eastern side, still ringed by a shallow fosse, the encircling ditch that would once have defined the boundary of the enclosure more sharply than it does today.

Earthen ring forts of this kind, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a family of some local standing. They were built by throwing up a bank from a surrounding ditch, and at Drumgownagh that basic form survives, if quietly. The fosse here is slight, measuring roughly 1.8 metres wide and only about 0.3 metres deep, which suggests either considerable silting over the centuries or that this was never among the more elaborately defended examples of the type. What the site loses in drama it gains in a certain stubborn persistence: while the surrounding ground was given over to commercial forestry, the fort platform was left alone, preserved almost by accident within its ring of spruce or pine.