The enclosing scarp, the low earthen edge that once defined the boundary of the settlement, rises barely ten to forty centimetres above the surrounding field. To an untrained eye, it would register as a gentle undulation in the grass, nothing more. Yet that faint rise in the land is the surviving trace of a rath, the most common form of early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically consisting of a circular or oval area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, within which a family and their livestock would have lived.

What makes this site quietly interesting is what the historical maps reveal about the rate of its disappearance. When the Ordnance Survey recorded the area on their six-inch map in 1838, the rath was still visible as an embanked circular enclosure, suggesting the earthworks were sufficiently intact to read clearly from the ground. By the time the same area was surveyed again for the 1914 edition, cartographers had switched to hachuring, a technique using short radiating lines to indicate raised ground, and the feature was recorded as an oval raised area. Between those two surveys, the shape had shifted from circular to oval in its mapped representation, and something of the original form had evidently been lost. Today, the rath is described as levelled, meaning the banks have been reduced, most likely through generations of agricultural activity, to the barely perceptible scarp that survives.