It stands just 1.2 metres high on its upslope northern side, yet drops to 3.5 metres on the southern edge, an asymmetry created entirely by the angle of the ground beneath it. The flat top, roughly 14 metres across, gives the whole thing the quiet, deliberate quality of something made with purpose rather than left by chance. This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement built during the early medieval period, typically between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and used as a farmstead or the residence of a local landowner.

The site appears in print as early as 1884, when the geologist and antiquarian G. H. Kinahan noted it under the name 'Lis', a word derived from the Irish lios, another common term for these circular enclosures. Kinahan recorded it in the context of the wider landscape, and subsequent survey work confirmed the mound's dimensions: a total diameter of 21 metres, with that distinctive flat platform at its centre. At some point after it fell out of use as a settlement, the mound was planted with large trees, a fate that befell many Irish ringforts in the agricultural centuries following their abandonment. Those trees are now gone, reduced to stumps, and the site was being replanted with conifers at the time it was last formally described.