The narrow neck of ground connecting it to the mainland floods at high tide, and what was a peninsula becomes, briefly, an island. On top of that headland, occupying the flat crown of an oval knoll roughly three metres above the surrounding ground, sits an early medieval ringfort, or rath, a type of enclosed farmstead that once served as the basic unit of rural settlement across early Christian Ireland. Its position is not accidental. From this knoll the views sweep across the bay to the north-east and south-east, and inland over the rolling coastal pasture in every other direction. Whoever chose this spot understood exactly what they were doing.

The rath itself is roughly oval, measuring about seventeen metres on its longer north-west to south-east axis and just under fourteen metres across. What remains of the enclosing bank, the low earthen boundary that would once have defined the farmstead, is best preserved along the northern and western arc, where it still stands to an external height of around 1.4 metres. Elsewhere it has been reduced to a low scarp, and along the north-north-east to south-east stretch the bank has degraded considerably, with stones protruding irregularly from what remains. A dip in the bank at the north-north-east may mark the original entrance, which would have faced the most gently sloping approach up the knoll. The interior is grassy and gives nothing away. What makes the wider setting particularly striking is that this rath is not alone. A second ringfort sits just sixty metres to the west on the same headland, and a further cluster of three more lies roughly three hundred metres to the north-north-west. Five ringforts within a few hundred metres of one another, on a tidal headland, suggests this corner of Mayo was once a good deal more densely occupied than its present silence implies.