The ground here was once enclosed by a roughly circular earthen bank, a rath, of the kind that thousands of Irish farming families built during the early medieval period, typically between the fifth and twelfth centuries, to protect their homesteads and livestock. This one measured approximately thirty metres across from north to south. Today there is nothing to see. The eastern portion was removed at some point, and the remainder was levelled, most likely by agricultural work over many decades.

What makes its absence quietly interesting is how thoroughly the cartographic record contradicts the physical one. Every edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the site marked with hachures, the fine lines surveyors used to indicate an earthwork or raised feature, laid out in a clear semicircular shape. The maps were doing their job faithfully, recording what was still present, or at least partially present, at the time of each survey. The tillage that now occupies the slope has simply continued doing its own work in the years since, and the rath lost ground with each pass of the plough until nothing remained above the surface. Cork is a county with a high density of such sites, and a significant number have met the same fate, absorbed quietly into farmland with no marker to indicate what once stood there.