The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed circular settlement typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, in which a family or small community lived within one or more earthen banks and ditches. This particular example has been levelled, but it refuses to disappear entirely: it shows up in growing crops as a faint raised area, the kind of ghost that becomes legible only at certain times of year when differential soil depth affects how plants grow.

The fort was already documented on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, recorded there as a hachured circular enclosure, the standard cartographic shorthand for an earthwork. Later OS editions from 1905 and 1937 refined this, showing a circular area approximately twenty-eight metres in diameter enclosed by a fosse, the ditch that would originally have accompanied an outer bank. A 1934 record by Bowman, citing the site as lying in land belonging to a D. Nugent, described a single-ramparted fort with a diameter of around thirty-nine yards. Despite the levelling, the fosse partially survives along an arc running from east to south-south-west, where an earthen field boundary has been built alongside or on top of it. That boundary, measuring roughly 0.9 metres on its interior face and 1.2 metres externally, may itself incorporate the remnants of a second bank, and a low rise on the western side of the site points in the same direction. What looks like a routine field margin, in other words, may be partly composed of the fort's own defensive material, redistributed and repurposed over generations of farming.