The western gable of the building cuts directly into the north-eastern edge of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, those circular earthen enclosures that were once the everyday farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically occupied between roughly 500 and 1000 AD. It is an oddly ordinary collision of the ancient and the agricultural, and it is one that has played out on farmland all across the country.

The enclosure itself is circular, with a diameter of twenty-seven metres, and is defined by an earthen bank rising to about 1.2 metres, running from south-west to north-north-east, with a scarp, a steepened slope of earth, completing the circuit from north-east to south-west. A gap in the bank to the north-north-east likely marks the original entrance. Inside, there is the possibility of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage associated with many ringforts, used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation of a living space. The site sits in grassland on a gentle slope, a setting typical for a rath of this kind, where the slight elevation would have offered both drainage and a degree of visibility across the surrounding land.