It is a rath, the more common name for a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead built across Ireland during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands survive in various states across the island, but this one has had a particularly complicated afterlife: trees have been planted across it, the enclosing bank has been levelled in places, and at the north-east a large quarry hole with a mound of upcast spoil suggests the site was dug into at some point, possibly for building material. The result is a monument that has been quietly dismantled and rearranged around itself.

The rath measures roughly 36 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west, a slightly irregular circle enclosed by what remains of an earthen bank. Inside, traces of cultivation ridges run east to west across the interior, evidence of agricultural use that almost certainly post-dates the monument's original function. These ridge-and-furrow patterns are a common sight across Irish landscapes where lazy-bed cultivation took place, but finding them inside an early medieval enclosure points to the site being repurposed for tillage at some later period, probably during the post-medieval centuries when the Barbavilla demesne was being managed and developed. Two further ringforts survive in the general vicinity, one about 230 metres to the north-west and another around 200 metres to the west-south-west, suggesting this part of Westmeath was once densely settled in the early medieval period, even if the landscape above ground now tells a very different story.