What lies beneath that ring of growth is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape. These were the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, where a family and their livestock lived within a raised earthen bank for security and social display alike.

The Archaeological Survey of Ireland recorded and measured this particular example in 2000. Their survey describes a raised, circular area of around 28 metres in diameter, defined by a scarped edge, meaning the bank has been cut or shaped to present a near-vertical face, standing roughly 1.5 metres high and 2 metres wide. Beyond that bank, an outer ditch, known as a fosse, runs from the eastern side around to the north-west, though it has silted up and filled in considerably over the years and now measures only about 30 centimetres in depth. The interior platform is level, as is typical of a well-preserved rath. A second enclosure, a separate and distinct site, lies approximately 170 metres to the south-east, which suggests this corner of Limerick was a settled and managed landscape for a very long time. The overgrown enclosing bank remained visible on a Google Earth image taken in June 2018, compiled as part of a record uploaded by Martin Fitzpatrick in July 2020.

The fort sits in pasture on a gentle slope with open views in all directions, which was almost certainly a deliberate choice by whoever originally built here. The trees planted along the scarped bank have made the interior somewhat self-contained, and from a distance the ring of vegetation is actually what draws the eye first. Visitors approaching on foot should look for that circular tree line as their marker. The fosse is shallow and patchy now, so it requires a careful look to trace the full arc of it from the eastern side round towards the north-west. The nearby enclosure to the south-east is worth locating separately, as the proximity of two such sites in a single field gives a tangible sense of how densely this kind of settlement once patterned the Irish countryside.