Ringforts, or raths, are circular enclosures defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and tens of thousands of them survive across Ireland, most dating to the early medieval period. What makes this particular example unusual is not just its position within the group, but the detail with which it was excavated and recorded, and the quietly strange things that excavation revealed.

The site sits within what antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp identified, writing between 1917 and 1919, as the supposed location of Temaír Erann, the ancient burial ground of the Ernai tribe on Slievereagh. Seán P. Ó Ríordáin excavated the fort, which he catalogued as Ringfort 3 of the Southern Group, between 1934 and 1935, publishing his findings in 1940. He found that the entrance on the western side was a solid passage about 5.18 metres wide, its fosse edges faced with dry stone masonry, and that two pairs of timber posts once guarded the interior of that entrance. Inside, overlapping clusters of post-holes hinted at several phases of rectangular timber houses built and rebuilt over time, their plans too muddled by successive occupation to read cleanly. A souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage used for storage or refuge, occupied the north-eastern quarter of the interior. Most striking, perhaps, was a small four-sided stone hearth, barely half a metre across, found not on a house floor but on top of the inner bank of the fort itself. Ó Ríordáin noted plainly that a hearth on the top of a bank is a surprising feature. The fort was placed under a Preservation Order on 23 January 1935, while the excavation was still under way.

The earthwork remains visible today as a circular cropmark and earthen form, identifiable on aerial imagery including Google Earth. It lies within a larger field system on the southern slopes of Slievereagh, and the surrounding landscape still carries the faint geometry of the wider archaeological complex, though rough pasture and the undulations of the hillside make individual features harder to separate on the ground than they appear from above. The site is on private farmland, so access would require appropriate permissions. Those approaching with an interest in the archaeology should be aware that much of what Ó Ríordáin uncovered is now backfilled; what remains visible is the earthwork itself, the encircling bank and fosse, and the broader sense of a landscape that was, for a considerable period, intensively and deliberately organised.