It is a small detail, but it says something about the people who built here, that they shaped the earth to suit themselves rather than simply working around the contours of the land.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the tenth centuries, though some were built earlier or later. They served as farmsteads, their earthen banks and ditches marking out a protected space for a family and their livestock. This particular example is circular, with a diameter of thirty-four metres, and is defined by an earthen bank some eight and a half metres wide, rising nearly two metres above the interior and over three metres on its outer face. Beyond the bank lies an external fosse, a cut ditch roughly three and a half metres wide and nearly two metres deep. A causeway entrance, just under two and a half metres wide, faces the south-east. The bank has been damaged, and large stones have been piled in the fosse and against the outer face on the south-east to south side, suggesting disturbance at some point, possibly from field clearance. Beneath the overgrowth that now covers much of the interior, there is a possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind often associated with storage or refuge in early medieval settlements.

What gives the site an added resonance is its aspect. Looking south-east from here, the view opens towards the Paps of Dana, the two rounded hills in the Derrynasaggart Mountains whose profiles have been associated with the goddess Anu since at least the early medieval period. Whether that alignment was incidental or deliberate, a family living within this bank would have had those hills on the horizon every morning.