It is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that thousands of early medieval families built across Ireland, typically between the sixth and tenth centuries. What makes this one quietly arresting is the contrast: garden fences and estate roads on one side, a steep earthen scarp on the other, the geometry of an ancient boundary still holding its shape against the grain of modern development.

When surveyors inspected the site in 2004, they found the rath in reasonable enough condition to record in some detail. The raised interior measures roughly 30.7 metres north to south and 24.4 metres east to west, defined on all sides by a scarp that reaches a maximum height of 4.7 metres on the eastern side. Beyond that scarp runs an external fosse, a defensive ditch, some 3.4 metres wide and just under a metre deep externally. A causewayed entrance, essentially a raised passage across the fosse, opens to the north at a width of 3.7 metres. Inside the enclosure, surveyors noted a possible house site, suggesting this was once a working domestic settlement rather than a purely defensive structure. The Ordnance Survey had been recording the feature as a circular enclosure since its earliest six-inch mapping, though the 1940 edition added the label "Tumulus", a term usually applied to burial mounds, indicating that cartographers of the time were uncertain what they were looking at.