The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was typically a circular or subcircular earthen enclosure used as a farmstead or defensible residence during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. This particular example measures approximately 45 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south, defined by two concentric banks with a fosse, a ditch, between them. What makes it quietly strange is not any single dramatic feature but the layering of its afterlife: quarrying has eaten into the monument at the south-west and east-north-east, a field boundary has been driven over the inner bank at the south, and the interior now contains a graveyard.

That combination of a rath with a later burial ground is not unheard of in Ireland. Early medieval enclosures were sometimes repurposed as ecclesiastical sites or informal burial grounds in subsequent centuries, perhaps because their circular boundaries already suggested a sacred or bounded space, or simply because the raised ground offered practical advantages. Here, the graveyard sits within the old interior, coexisting with whatever earthworks survive beneath the grass. A six-metre-wide entrance causeway remains identifiable at the south-east, and the outer bank is still traceable from the north-east around through the east to the south-east, giving at least a partial sense of the original circuit. Looking south-east from the site, Killure Castle is visible roughly 250 metres away, a reminder that this stretch of north Galway was a landscape shaped and reshaped across many centuries of occupation.