The building sits inside what was once a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD, that served as a defended homestead for a farming family. Thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, but this one has been quietly absorbed into the working landscape of a modern farm.

The 1842 six-inch Ordnance Survey map recorded the site as a hachured circular enclosure, the cartographic convention for showing an earthwork in relief, indicating the bank was clearly visible at that time. The enclosure measured roughly 35 metres in diameter. By the time the site was formally assessed, the earthen bank survived only along two arcs, running from the north-east around to the south-east, and from the south-west around to the north-west. The sections in between had been levelled, most likely to allow farm machinery or livestock easier passage into the interior. That interior, once the domestic core of an early medieval household, is now given over to agricultural storage, with a hay shed occupying the space where a family would once have lived and kept their animals close at night for protection.