This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that served as a basic unit of rural life throughout early medieval Ireland, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across the country, yet each one rewards a closer look, and this example is unusually well preserved.

The enclosure is broadly oval, measuring just over fifty metres across its longest axis. A substantial earthen bank, nearly three and a half metres high on the exterior at its tallest point, surrounds a level interior that remains grassy today. Outside the bank runs a fosse, a defensive ditch, which here is broad and flat-based rather than V-shaped, ranging around three and a half metres wide. What makes this site particularly interesting is the evidence along the outer edge of that fosse. A line of prostrate stones to the east, a low stony rise to the north-north-west, and a field fence with traces of stone facing running from south-east to north-west all appear to follow the same circuit, and together they may preserve the outline of an original external bank, a third layer of defence that would have made this a more formidable enclosure than it first appears. The formal entrance was to the east, a three-metre gap in the bank reached by a causeway nearly five metres wide across the fosse. Two smaller, eroded breaks in the bank to the north-east and north look less deliberate; the northern one is edged with large stones on its slumped outer face, suggesting at least some later attempt at consolidation. The site sits on a gentle rise with Loughangormadeen, a small lake, roughly sixty metres to the north, and the considerably larger Lough Bekan about two hundred and fifty metres to the south-east. The perimeter is now thickly ringed with hawthorn and blackthorn, the kind of dense, self-seeding scrub that tends to colonise undisturbed earthworks and, in the process, helps to protect them.