It is easy to walk past without quite registering what it is. This is a rath, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, typically constructed between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries as a defended homestead for a single family or small farming community. The bank here is poorly preserved, but a gap of about three metres on the south-eastern side may represent the original entrance, the point through which cattle were driven in the evenings and through which the occupants came and went about their daily lives.

The setting itself adds a layer of interest. Eskers are long, sinuous ridges of gravel and sand deposited by meltwater streams beneath retreating glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. They run across the Irish midlands like raised causeways, and they were valued in early historic times as dry, elevated ground above the surrounding bogs and pasture. Choosing a west-facing esker slope for a settlement was a practical decision, offering drainage, visibility, and a degree of natural elevation. The site does not stand alone in the landscape either. A cillín, a small informal burial ground of the kind historically used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground, lies about forty metres to the south-east. A separate enclosure sits roughly a hundred metres to the north-east. Together, these features suggest that the area around Atticoffey was more actively organised in early historic times than the quiet grassland there today might suggest.