The find was reported to a researcher named Bowman in 1934 by the landowner of the time, a J. O'Doherty, who recalled that five or six iron wedges, each roughly four to five inches long with a curved edge, had come out of the ground about twelve years earlier. By the time Bowman was asking questions, no one had seen them for seven years. What they were, exactly, remains unclear; the description does not match any obvious category of tool or fitting with certainty, and the objects themselves have left no further trace in the record.

The earthwork they came from is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built throughout early medieval Ireland, typically between the sixth and tenth centuries. Bowman described it in 1934 as a levelled double-ramparted fort with a diameter of around forty yards, suggesting it once had two concentric banks, a form associated with higher-status settlements. By that point it had already been considerably reduced, and today the earthen bank that defined the enclosure survives in places as a rise of only about 25 centimetres, with much of it absorbed into the existing field fence system. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows it clearly as a hachured circular enclosure of roughly 35 metres across, and interestingly also marks a limekiln, a structure used for burning limestone to produce agricultural lime, on the outer face of the south-western bank. Whether the kiln was constructed after the fort fell out of use, or whether it predates the mapping, the notes do not say. Beneath the interior of the enclosure there is also a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind often associated with ringforts, possibly used for storage or as a place of refuge.