This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the standard farmstead enclosure of early Christian Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. What gives this particular example a slightly puzzling quality is that no one can any longer identify its original entrance. Several gaps exist in the bank, but all of them appear to be modern intrusions rather than the deliberately constructed opening the builders would have left.

When a surveyor described the monument in 1970, the rath measured roughly 39 metres east to west and 33 metres north to south, enclosed by a steep earthen bank, a wide shallow fosse (a dry ditch dug as part of the defensive perimeter), and a very fragmentary outer bank. That outer bank behaves oddly: in places it runs out of alignment with the fosse, which has led to the suggestion that it may have been added later, rather than forming part of the original design. The inner bank has also been disturbed, pushed outward into the fosse along its eastern and south-eastern arc. The 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map already showed the feature as a circular, partially tree-lined earthwork, which means the basic shape was already recognisable to nineteenth-century cartographers. A modern causeway sits outside one of the gaps on the north-western side. Inside the enclosure, the ground slopes gently to the south-east, and faint cultivation ridges run across it on a north-west to south-east axis, suggesting the interior was worked as agricultural ground at some point after the enclosure fell out of use as a settlement. Approximately 25 metres to the north-east lie the traces of a house site and associated earthworks, hinting at a cluster of activity in this corner of the field rather than an isolated monument.