It is, on the face of it, an unlikely archaeological site, yet beneath the overgrowth and discarded ironwork lies a structure that was already old when the surrounding countryside was being farmed in recognisably modern ways.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically a circular enclosure defined by earthen banks and ditches and used as a farmstead or place of protection. This particular example is roughly circular, around thirty metres in diameter, and its earthen bank still rises to about a metre in height along a south-south-west to north-north-east arc, with the outer face reinforced or revetted in stone. What survives, however, is only part of what once existed. Local information recorded in the 1990s indicated that the remainder of the bank was levelled around 1974, when a shed was built just outside the enclosure to the south-east. The loss is not unusual; thousands of ringforts across Ireland were removed during the agricultural intensification of the twentieth century, and this site sits somewhere between survival and erasure, its partial bank a record of what came before the digger arrived.