A rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthwork enclosure typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a farmstead, once stood here in undulating grassland in north County Galway. Today it is very poorly preserved, its form legible only in fragments, and the reasons for that gradual erasure are written into the landscape around it.

The site was originally defined by two earthen banks with an intervening fosse, that is, a ditch dug between them to reinforce the boundary. Of the inner bank, a stretch from the south-east to the south-west still exists in some form. The outer bank and fosse are visible only from the south-east around to the south, and the most likely explanation for the loss of the outer bank beyond that point is the construction of a railway line immediately to the south. Quarrying has further compromised the site across the arc from south-west to north-west, removing material wholesale rather than gradually. Despite all of this, the interior has not been left entirely empty. A souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlement sites, has been recorded there, catalogued separately under its own reference number.

The cumulative effect of railway construction and quarrying on an already modest earthwork means that reading the original shape of the enclosure requires some patience and lateral thinking. The surviving bank fragments give just enough to suggest where the circuit once ran, but the site rewards attention precisely because the forces that damaged it, industrial, infrastructural, agricultural, are themselves part of a longer local history layered over something much older beneath the grass.