The earthworks here are classed as a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular enclosure built from earth and used, for the most part, as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1200 AD. What sets this particular example apart is its scale and its doubled defences. Two substantial earthen banks enclose a raised interior measuring just under 45 metres in diameter, and between those banks sits a wide, deep fosse, the technical term for a ditch dug to reinforce the barrier. That combination of double bank and intermediate ditch marks this out as something beyond the ordinary single-ringed enclosures that dot the Irish countryside in their thousands.

The original entrance to the enclosure can still be identified at the south-east, where breaks in both banks align and faint traces of a causeway cross the fosse between them. That a causeway survives at all speaks to how carefully the approach was managed; visitors or livestock would have been funnelled through a single, controllable point. Whoever occupied this site commanded enough labour and resources to construct a genuinely imposing set of earthworks, suggesting a person of some local standing, a prosperous farmer or minor lord in the early medieval landscape of what is now County Cavan. The interior, raised above the surrounding ground, would have held a timber house and ancillary structures, none of which now remain above the surface.

The site today is densely overgrown with vegetation, which both obscures and protects it. The earthworks themselves remain intact enough to give a clear sense of their original form, and the scale of the banks becomes apparent only once you are standing among them.