This is a rath, the most common type of early medieval enclosure found across Ireland, typically built as a defended farmstead for a single family or small community, probably sometime between the sixth and tenth centuries. What makes this particular example worth pausing over is the layering of its defences: not one but two banks, separated by a fosse, the outer bank still rising half a metre above the surrounding ground after more than a thousand years of agricultural wear.

The inner bank is the more substantial of the two, a ring of earth and stone roughly three metres wide and a metre high enclosing a circular area thirty metres in diameter. Immediately outside it runs a fosse, a cut ditch nearly a metre deep and three metres across, and beyond that a second, slightly wider bank at half the height of the inner one. Traces of a stone kerb survive along the inner face of the main bank, suggesting that at some point its structure was reinforced or tidied with laid stonework. A break in the eastern side of the inner bank may mark where the original entrance once stood; east-facing entrances are common in Irish ringforts, though the reasons for this preference remain a matter of some debate among archaeologists.