This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Most were home to a single farming family, the enclosing bank and ditch serving as much to define status and territory as to provide defence. This one, however, has been absorbed so thoroughly into the surrounding agricultural landscape that its original boundaries have blurred into later field fences, and what may once have been a fosse, the external ditch dug to reinforce the enclosure, now reads more like an ordinary field drain.

The rath occupies a natural rise at the break of slope on its north-western side, a position that would have offered clear views westward and northward across undulating grassland. The oval platform measures roughly 33 metres on its longer north-east to south-west axis and just over 20 metres across, and its enclosing scarp reaches around four metres in height on the western side, where the natural fall of the ground amplifies the effect. Two breaks in the scarp hint at the structure's original layout. A gap on the eastern side opens directly onto the spine of the ridge and is thought to mark the original entrance, while a wider slumped area on the south-south-west is flanked by two low banks projecting several metres outward, possibly the remains of an outwork or funnelled approach. A second rath sits just 70 metres to the north-north-east, suggesting that this part of the Mayo countryside once supported a cluster of early medieval farmsteads in relatively close proximity to one another.