This is a rath, the most common monument type in Ireland, a class of earthwork enclosure typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and used as a defended farmstead for a single family or small community. What makes this particular example worth pausing over is not dramatic preservation but the legibility of its details, an oval interior measuring roughly 48 metres north to south and 39 metres east to west, still ringed by a low earthen bank and a wide, flat-bottomed external fosse, the fosse being the drainage and defensive ditch that encircled the outside of such enclosures.

The bank itself survives to an internal height of around 0.75 metres and an external height of between 1.5 and 2 metres, which gives some sense of how the enclosure would once have presented to anyone approaching across the valley. The fosse reaches 1.2 metres deep on the northern side, though only 0.5 metres on the south, suggesting uneven survival or differential silting over time. Two entrances are visible, one in the eastern quadrant at 3 metres wide, which is a fairly typical placement for a rath entrance, and a second at the south-west of the same width, though this second opening may be of more recent origin rather than part of the original design. The interior has been ploughed at some point, which has smoothed and disturbed whatever subsurface features may have once existed there, a fate common to low-lying raths on productive agricultural land throughout the Irish midlands and south-east.