The result is a rare layering of two quite different kinds of enclosure, one ancient and one ornamental, occupying more or less the same ground.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically dating from the early medieval period in Ireland and used as a farmstead or dwelling. This particular example is oval, measuring approximately 30 metres on its longer axis and 22 metres across, and retains a poorly preserved earth and stone bank along with a shallow fosse, the term for a defensive or boundary ditch, running from the north-northeast around through the east to the southeast. Inside, the ground rises towards the centre, and faint cultivation ridges running northeast to southwest are still legible in the soil, suggesting the interior was farmed at some point. The northwest quadrant also holds the remains of a rectangular house site, adding another structural layer to what is already a complicated piece of ground. Sometime after 1700, presumably as part of the formal landscaping associated with Benison Lodge, an outer bank of earth and stone was constructed around the monument at an average distance of about fifteen metres and planted with trees, effectively converting the old rath into a decorative tree-ring of the kind fashionable on eighteenth-century Irish estates. It is a curious fate for a site that had already accumulated centuries of use, turning something functional and vernacular into a piece of designed landscape.