But that curve is the surviving edge of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead that was the standard form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands exist across the country, yet many have been quietly ploughed away or absorbed into the landscape, making even a partial survival worth pausing over.

The earthwork here takes the form of a raised bank, or rath, running from west-northwest to east-northeast, standing at around 2.55 metres in height, with an external fosse, essentially a defensive ditch, cut to a depth of approximately 1.15 metres. Together, bank and fosse would originally have enclosed a roughly circular area somewhere between 35 and 40 metres in diameter, a typical scale for a single-family farmstead of the period. The site was already being mapped by the time the Ordnance Survey carried out its six-inch survey of Ireland in 1842, where it appears as a dotted circle, the cartographers' shorthand for a feature they could identify but perhaps not fully trace on the ground.