The ring-ditch, roughly fifteen metres in diameter, is defined by an unbroken fosse, a term for a rock-cut or earthen ditch, forming a complete circuit just beneath the modern ground surface. What makes it particularly interesting is not the feature itself but what has happened to it: the outer fosse of a nearby rath has cut directly across it, slicing through the ring-ditch and complicating what might otherwise seem like a straightforward piece of landscape archaeology.

Ring-ditches of this kind are generally understood to be the ploughed-out or otherwise reduced remains of prehistoric burial monuments, often Bronze Age round barrows whose central mound has long since disappeared, leaving only the encircling ditch as a trace. A rath, by contrast, is an early medieval enclosed farmstead, typically surrounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches. The fact that the rath's outer fosse cuts the ring-ditch tells us something concrete about sequence: the ring-ditch was already there, and the rath was built later, its builders either unaware of or indifferent to the earlier feature beneath them. This kind of stratigraphic relationship, one monument physically truncating another, is how archaeologists begin to build a relative chronology of a landscape without needing a single written source.