This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built in early medieval Ireland, typically between the seventh and tenth centuries, and used by a single family or small farming community as a combination of homestead and livestock enclosure. Tens of thousands of them once dotted the Irish countryside; this one measures roughly 50 metres north to south and 44 metres east to west, making it a reasonably substantial example.

The bank is accompanied by an external fosse, a defensive ditch cut into the ground, running from the north-northwest to the southeast, though at only 0.4 metres deep it is now quite shallow, worn down by centuries of grazing and weathering. Inside the enclosure, a shallow depression traces an arc from east to southwest along the inner edge of the bank, possibly the remnant of an internal drain or the ghost of a structure that once stood there. Three gaps break the circuit of the bank, to the north-northeast, the south-southeast, and the west, the largest of these nearly six metres wide, which likely marks the original entrance. Across the interior, cultivation ridges run on a north-south axis, the corrugated signature of later agricultural use, suggesting that long after its original inhabitants were gone the enclosed ground was turned over to tillage, perhaps during one of the periodic pressures on arable land that recurred throughout Irish history.