It is a rath, or ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that early medieval Irish families built in their thousands between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. What makes this one worth noting is the quality of its survival and the particular detail of its construction.

The enclosure is subcircular in plan, measuring approximately 50.5 metres north to south and 47.5 metres east to west, and it follows the classic form of a bivallate ringfort, meaning it has two concentric earthen banks separated by a fosse, or ditch. The inner bank, the one that would have enclosed the dwelling area, retains traces of stone-facing on its inner face at the south-east, a detail that suggests the builders invested some care in its finish and that the site may have belonged to a family of moderate standing. In early medieval Ireland, the size and elaboration of a ringfort often reflected the social rank of its occupants, with single banks indicating ordinary farming households and multiple banks generally associated with higher-status families. The townland boundary now runs along the outer bank from the north-north-west around through north to south-east, one of those quiet ironies of landscape history where an administrative line has simply followed a pre-existing earthwork for convenience. Both banks have been cut by cattle gaps at various points, the ordinary result of generations of farming working around and through a structure that was always too solid to remove entirely but too inconvenient to leave completely intact.