The structure is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1200 AD, when thousands of such sites were built across the country as the defended homesteads of farming families.

The bank that defines the enclosure is earthen, around 4.7 metres wide, and noticeably more substantial on the western side, where it rises to 2 metres on the exterior, compared to 1.6 metres on the east. Outside the bank there would originally have been a fosse, a defensive ditch, and traces of it can still be read in the landscape if you know what to look for. Along the eastern to southern arc, a band of irises roughly 6 metres wide marks where the fosse has been filled in over time; iris colonisation is a well-known indicator of disturbed or waterlogged ground, and here the plants are doing the work of a signpost. On the other side, between the south-west and north, a curving field bank runs parallel to the rath at a gap of about 4.8 metres; this may itself be a modification of an original outer bank. At the north-east and east, a modern field boundary cuts across the site, truncating whatever remained of the fosse in that quarter. The original entrance was most likely in the south-east, as was common with Irish ringforts. One further feature resists easy explanation: within the north-east quadrant, close to the inner face of the bank, there is a hollow measuring roughly 4 by 3 metres and about 0.8 metres deep, whose purpose remains unknown.