The dead, in other words, have moved into a space that was already ancient when they arrived.

The earthwork is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead commonly built between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries, though examples exist outside those dates. This one measures some 33 metres in diameter and retains, in fair condition, a series of concentric features: an inner berm-like element, a fosse (a defensive ditch), and an outer bank. The fosse and outer bank now survive only along the southern arc, the rest worn or disturbed over centuries. The inner enclosing element is the more intriguing puzzle. Rather than a straightforward earthen bank, what survives appears to reflect something later imposed upon it: a burial ground that fills the entire interior has its own boundary wall running along the inside perimeter, and that wall is thought to overlie whatever original bank once stood there. The rath, in effect, was requisitioned. Its circular boundary was already a ready-made enclosure, and at some point a community began burying its dead within it, reshaping the inner edge to suit. A gap in the south-west of the enclosure appears to be a modern breach rather than an original entrance. The layering here is characteristic of how the Irish landscape works: one use quietly absorbs another, leaving a form that belongs to no single period.