It is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead that was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Tens of thousands once existed across the island; many have been ploughed flat or built over, which is part of what makes a well-preserved example worth pausing over.

This particular rath measures 37.4 metres in diameter, defined by an earthen bank and an external fosse, the shallow ditch dug to provide material for the bank and to reinforce the boundary. The fosse no longer runs the full circuit; it survives only from the north around to the north-east, the rest having been lost or obscured over time. A field wall, almost certainly a later addition, overlies the bank along the northern to east-north-eastern arc, the kind of quiet agricultural reuse that happened across centuries as farmers incorporated earlier earthworks into their own boundaries without necessarily knowing or caring what they were. The result is a structure that belongs simultaneously to several different periods, each layer of use sitting on top of the last.