What makes it quietly strange is not its age but its afterlife: by 1922, when the Ordnance Survey recorded it on their six-inch map, this early medieval enclosure had been rebranded in the landscape as a Pound, the kind of enclosure used to impound stray livestock until their owners paid a fine to reclaim them. The borrowing was pragmatic. A ready-made circular bank saved considerable labour, and whoever designated it a pound presumably thought little about the centuries of earlier use compressed beneath the turf.

The earthwork itself is a rath, a ringfort of the type built throughout Ireland roughly between the early centuries AD and the early medieval period, typically as a defended farmstead enclosing a family's dwelling and perhaps some livestock. This one measures approximately 27 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west, defined by a stony earthen bank with a carefully levelled interior. The engineering required a small trick: because the ground slopes naturally downward to the south, the builders built up the southern half of the enclosure to achieve a flat floor, which is why the bank reads differently depending on where you stand. At the north it barely projects above the surrounding field, while at the south it rises to an external scarp of nearly one and a half metres. Inside, sod-covered heaps of field clearance stone sit in the west and east halves, accumulated over generations of agricultural tidying, and a shallow depression occupies the southern interior. A defunct field fence meets the bank at the north, and a telegraph pole has been planted on the bank itself at the north-north-west, the most recent layer in a long sequence of pragmatic reuse.