This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, one of the most common monument types in the country, of which tens of thousands survive in various states of preservation. Most date from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and functioned as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. What gives this particular example its interest is not grandeur but the way survival and erasure sit side by side within the same monument.

The rath measures approximately 30.2 metres across on its longer axis and 26.5 metres on the shorter, making it a modest but reasonably typical example of the form. It is defined on its northern and western sides by a classic arrangement of three elements: an inner scarp, an intervening fosse (a cut ditch), and an outer bank. To the south, however, these enclosing features have been obliterated, and a later field bank cuts across the monument at the south-west and south-east, suggesting the land here was reorganised at some point and the earthworks simply levelled or built over. A curving field bank to the north-east may preserve, almost by accident, the ghost of the original outer bank. In the south-west quadrant of the interior there is a rectangular hollow, around 6.4 metres long, 1.7 to 2.5 metres wide, and up to 0.8 metres deep, which may be a souterrain. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with early medieval settlements, used for storage or as a place of refuge. A second ringfort lies just 150 metres to the south-east, suggesting this corner of north Galway was once a relatively busy agricultural landscape, its inhabitants leaving their mark in earthworks that the fields have only incompletely swallowed.