On the 1841 to 1842 Ordnance Survey map of this part of north Kerry, the field immediately south of a low earthwork near Ballincloher was recorded as Parkavacoosh, an Anglicisation of Páirc an Bhácúis, meaning field of the oven. By the 1916 edition the name had gone, leaving no obvious explanation for why an early surveyor thought a bakehouse or oven belonged in the landscape here. The earthwork itself, meanwhile, simply continued to sit between two boggy fields, largely untroubled by the passing of either century.

The site is a univallate rath, a term for a ringfort enclosed by a single bank and ditch rather than multiple concentric rings. These were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, built to pen livestock and signal status as much as to defend. At Ballincloher the enclosing earthen bank averages five metres wide at the base and still stands close to two metres high on its outer face, with an exterior fosse, or ditch, running around it that remains waterlogged. The interior is nearly circular, measuring about thirty metres across in both directions. A later fieldbank cuts across the site on a northeast to southwest line, and several breaks exist in the enclosing bank, though whether any of these openings are original entrances or later disturbances cannot now be determined. The surrounding ground is boggy, which may partly explain why the fosse has held its water and why the earthwork has survived at all in a landscape that has otherwise been thoroughly worked and remapped over the centuries.