Tree-rings, as such features are sometimes classified, are groves that have grown up within or around earlier earthworks, often obscuring their origins. In this case, however, the trees turned out to be incidental. When the site was inspected in July 1957, before the land was levelled for agriculture, an investigator working from Office of Public Works files recorded something considerably older beneath the scrub: an earthen ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that was the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular bank and ditch enclosing a living area of perhaps one family or small household.

By the time the site was surveyed in more recent years, the levelling had done considerable damage. What had once been a bank roughly 1.2 metres wide and nearly a metre high on its outer face had been reduced to a barely perceptible rise, its internal height now just 0.12 metres and external height 0.4 metres. The surrounding fosse, a shallow external ditch that would originally have reinforced the enclosed character of the site, survives only as a slight depression between 1.2 and 1.6 metres wide and a mere 0.12 metres deep. The overall circular platform measures 28 metres across, still just visible as a raised area that slopes gently upward toward the centre. Four tree stumps remain, roughly aligned northwest to southeast across the interior, the last physical evidence of the grove that once defined the place on a map and, in doing so, accidentally preserved its outline from being forgotten entirely. The river that runs approximately 100 metres to the north and east would have made this a practical location for early settlement, close enough to water without sitting in the worst of the marshy ground.