This is a rath, or ringfort, the kind of enclosed homestead that once dotted the Irish countryside in early medieval times, typically built between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries as a defended farmstead for a single family or small community. The earthen bank, known as a scarp, still describes a near-perfect circle roughly 33 metres across, and the site sits on a natural rise that would have given its original occupants a commanding view across the low, undulating pasture and bogland that spreads out around Kiltimagh in every direction.

The earthwork itself carries the marks of a long and complicated afterlife. Parts of the scarp on the western and north-western side have been absorbed into a later field fence, and elsewhere the outer face of the bank has been cut back to something close to vertical, or retains traces of stone facing added at some point after the original construction. A ramp-like break in the bank on the east-north-east side, about two metres wide, is thought to be where the original entrance once stood. The interior is divided by a property fence running roughly north-west to south-east, and on either side of that fence the ground holds two faint but puzzling features: a slight D-shaped rise on the north-east side and a shallow D-shaped depression on the south-west side. Their significance remains unclear. The perimeter is fringed with blackthorn and hawthorn, and blackthorn scrub has begun to encroach across the south-western half of the interior, slowly reclaiming what open ground remains.