The trees, following the curve of the bank, give the site an oddly formal appearance from a distance, more like a planted folly than a farmstead enclosure that has been quietly decaying into the hillside for over a thousand years.

The earthwork is a rath, the most common type of ringfort found across Ireland. These were the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth century, where a family and their livestock would have lived within a circular bank and ditch. This example sits just below the crest of a north Tipperary hill, angled so that its interior slopes gently to the north-west. It is roughly circular, measuring just under twenty-seven metres across in both directions. The enclosing bank, built from gravelly clay and stone, is about five metres wide and rises to two metres on its outer face, though the interior face is considerably lower at around half a metre, the ground level inside having built up over centuries. Beyond the bank runs a fosse, a shallow outer ditch now reduced to a gentle depression, about four and a half metres wide and barely twenty centimetres deep. A narrow gap of just over a metre in the south-west section of the bank marks what would have been the original entrance. The larch trees, planted along the bank and into part of the interior, are clearly a later addition, though they now define the site as much as the earthwork itself does.