That omission is itself a small puzzle, since a raised platform of this kind, sitting on a low rise above poorly drained pasture, would not have been easy to miss from the ground. The structure is a rath, a type of ringfort consisting of a roughly circular or, in this case, sub-rectangular enclosure defined by an earthen bank rather than stone walling. These were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically occupied between the sixth and tenth centuries, though they continued to be built and used outside that range.

The enclosure measures roughly 18.5 metres along its north-east to south-west axis and 15.5 metres across, making it a modest example of the type. The surrounding bank is 3.2 metres wide and rises to about 0.8 metres, low even by the standards of a class of monument known for its subtlety. Notably, there is no fosse, the external ditch that normally accompanies a rath and provides the material from which the bank was piled up. Its absence may indicate that the site was never fully completed, or that local conditions made digging impractical near a waterlogged field. A survey carried out between 1942 and 1944 could find no recognisable trace of the original entrance, which would once have been a formal gap in the bank, sometimes flanked by additional earthworks.