Roughly 33 metres across and enclosed by two broad, low banks of earth and stone with a fosse, or ditch, running between them and another along the outside, it sits on a south-facing slope within a tree plantation, its interior also planted with trees. That planting is not incidental to the structure; it may well be the entire point of it.

A ringfort, or rath, is typically an early medieval enclosed settlement, the banked and ditched farmstead of an Irish family from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. This site, however, carries a different suspicion. The outer bank and its accompanying fosse appear to have been constructed after 1700, and it is considered possible that the whole earthwork was conceived from the outset as a designed landscape feature on the grounds of Clonhugh Lodge, the earlier name for the house that stands some 870 metres to the northwest. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, landowners across Ireland and Britain frequently shaped their demesne grounds into picturesque compositions, and circular tree rings or artificial earthworks were among the devices used to create variety and visual interest across an estate. If that is what happened here, the site was not a settlement later repurposed but an ornamental conceit dressed in the borrowed language of prehistory from the very beginning.