On the brow of a hill in north Cork, where the ground falls away to the north and west, the earthwork that once commanded this rise has been almost entirely levelled. What remains is a low, saucer-shaped platform, roughly thirty metres north to south and twenty-four metres east to west, sitting quietly in pasture. A ringfort, or rath, was typically a circular or oval enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland. Here the bank is gone, but the ghost of the fosse, the surrounding ditch, still shows up in aerial photography as a cropmark, the buried feature drawing moisture differently from the surrounding soil and leaving a faint ring legible only from above.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site as a hachured oval enclosure, suggesting it was already diminished by that point but still traceable on the ground. By 1934, the antiquarian Bowman described it as a single-ramparted oval fort, measuring roughly forty-five metres by twenty-eight metres, on land belonging to a John McCarthy. That those dimensions differ somewhat from what is measured today reflects the gradual attrition of such sites over decades of agricultural use. The discrepancy also hints at how much depends on who is measuring, and when, and with what survives underfoot at the time of looking.