That makes it a cashel, the term used for a stone-walled ringfort, a form of enclosed settlement typical of early medieval Ireland, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, when such enclosures served as farmsteads for farming families of some local standing. What gives this particular example its quietly unsettling quality is that it now sits inside a mature plantation of trees, the canopy closing over a circular wall that was already ancient when the woodland arrived.

The enclosure is twenty-five metres in diameter, its boundary formed by a double-kerbed wall roughly three metres wide and surviving to between a quarter and nearly a full metre in height. The construction method is a mixture of orthostatic boulders, meaning stones set upright on their ends, and horizontal courses, with a loose rubble core packed between the two faces. The northern and south-western sections of the wall remain largely intact, while elsewhere the structure has collapsed into a spread of tumbled stone. There is no surviving trace of a fosse, which would be an external ditch, nor of any formal entrance or internal features such as building platforms or souterrains, the underground stone-lined passages occasionally found within cashels and used for storage or refuge.