That kind of incremental loss is common enough across Ireland, but it makes the surviving portions all the more worth reading carefully.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most numerous monument type in the Irish landscape. Raths were typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, with earthen banks and ditches defining a protected domestic space rather than a military fortification. This example sits on the north-east slope of a gentle north-south ridge in upland country, with the River Small to the south. It is roughly oval in plan, measuring nineteen metres north to south and twenty-six metres east to west, and was originally defended by two concentric earth and stone banks separated by a fosse, the ditch between them, which ran about three and a half metres wide and one metre deep. A narrow entrance gap, just over two metres wide, opened at the south. The inner bank still stands to an external height of between half a metre and one and a half metres depending on where you measure, though the field fence has done considerable damage at the north. The outer bank survives only on the west side, and the fosse between them is visible only from the south round to the west; elsewhere it has been filled or disturbed. Close by to the north lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval settlements and used variously for storage or refuge, recorded separately but clearly part of the same broader landscape of occupation.