A drumlin is a smooth, oval hill shaped by glacial movement, and whoever chose this particular one as a site knew what they were doing: the rath commands extensive views to the south-west and north, with the low-lying wet ground that borders it to the east and south-west making it naturally defensible and conspicuous in equal measure. A rath, or ringfort, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, within which a family and their livestock would have lived. This example is an oval raised area roughly 36 metres on its longer axis, its enclosing bank still reaching 1.6 metres on the outside at its north-western arc.

The bank itself tells a layered story. Its western arc is the best preserved, while the southern and south-eastern sections have been worn down to little more than a low stony rim along the inner face. At the north-west to east-north-east, the original bank has been absorbed into a later field boundary, reduced to a scarp and faced with stone, the kind of quiet recycling of older landscape features that happened countless times across rural Ireland as farming practices changed. The original entrance has not been conclusively identified. There is a narrow gap at the south-east, flanked by two large stones, but this appears to be a relatively recent break rather than the designed threshold. A low area on the east-north-east side, partly hidden by overgrowth, is another candidate. Inside, the ground slopes gently downward to the south-east, and two faint parallel ridges running across the interior may be the traces of old cultivation beds. The bank is thickly ringed with gorse and hawthorn, which obscures detail but also, incidentally, preserves it. Ninety metres to the south-east lies a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site associated with fire-heated water, and a second rath sits 240 metres to the north. There was also a longstanding official record associating this enclosure with a children's burial ground, of the kind sometimes found within or beside raths in Ireland, though this appears to have been entered in error.