That combination, an ancient enclosure whose interior has been ploughed, flooded, and farmed at various points in its long life, gives the place a layered, slightly puzzling quality.

The site is a rath, the earthen variety of ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish countryside. Thousands were built during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, typically as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. This one measures approximately thirty metres north to south and just over thirty-one metres east to west, making it a fairly standard example in terms of size. What defines it physically is the enclosing bank, standing to about 1.8 metres in height, built from earth but faced with stone. A gap four metres wide opens to the north, most likely the original entrance. Somewhere along the way, a modern stone wall was laid along the inner face of the bank to the north-east, the kind of quiet agricultural reuse that happens when a usable boundary is already sitting in the landscape.