The earthen bank that would once have enclosed a farmstead, perhaps a thousand or more years ago, has been reduced to the faintest of traces, and even those traces are now gone. What remains is a patch of pasture on a west-facing slope, and the knowledge that something was once there.

The site came to attention not through any survey of the earthwork itself, but through the discovery of a souterrain nearby in April 1976. Souterrains are underground stone-lined passages or chambers, typically associated with Early Medieval ringforts, and their purpose is still debated; they may have served for storage, refuge, or both. When investigators from University College Cork examined the newly found souterrain, they noticed, in the north-east corner of the field, what they described as faint traces of a bank running roughly from south-south-east to north-north-west. That description, cautious and qualified as it is, represents the only recorded evidence that a rath ever stood here. A rath, the Irish term for this type of enclosed farmstead, would typically have consisted of one or more circular earthen banks with an internal ditch, enclosing a domestic settlement. By 1976, even the faint bank the inspectors noted was marginal. Subsequently, field fences in the area were removed, and with them went whatever slight undulation in the ground might have confirmed the old enclosure. There is now no visible surface trace.