The ground rises slightly above what was once wet, marshy land, and that rise is essentially the whole story, at least as far as the eye is concerned. No earthworks break the surface, no stones protrude, and a visitor walking across the spot today would have little reason to pause. And yet the hillock once held a ringfort, the circular or near-circular enclosure type common across early medieval Ireland, in which a family or small community would have lived within a raised and ditched boundary, often on exactly this kind of marginal, boggy ground where the slight elevation made all the difference.

The site appears clearly enough on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, where it is drawn as a polygonal enclosure. By 1973, when the site was examined on the ground, the earthwork had already been demolished, though faint traces of a sub-rectangular house site were still detectable on top of the hillock, sitting at the centre of what had been the levelled monument. That pairing, a domestic structure within the interior of a ringfort, is a fairly typical arrangement, but by 2011 even the broader outline of the enclosure had become difficult to confirm without aerial photography. A Digital Globe image taken that November showed the ghost of the ringfort's circuit just barely legible from above, the kind of cropmark or soil shadow that vanishes at ground level entirely.