To most people passing, it would read as little more than a slight rise in an otherwise unremarkable field. What it actually represents is the remains of an early medieval ringfort, a class of enclosure that once served as a farmstead or small settlement, typically for a single family of some local standing. Thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, but that familiarity does not diminish the strangeness of encountering one reduced almost to a suggestion of itself.

The site was catalogued by McCaffrey in 1952, who classified it as a stone fort, distinguishing it from the purely earthen raths more common in other parts of the country. The enclosing element, that low bank which would once have defined the boundary clearly enough to offer both a physical and symbolic boundary to the settlement within, is now poorly preserved. On the western side in particular, field-clearance rubble has been piled against it over the years, the accumulated result of generations of farmers gathering loose stone from the surrounding land and depositing it somewhere conveniently out of the way. It is a process that has both obscured and, in an ironic sense, added to the monument, burying the original fabric under material that belongs to an entirely different era of land use.