This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement in Ireland. Built roughly between the seventh and tenth centuries, raths typically served as enclosed farmsteads, their encircling banks offering modest protection for a family, their livestock, and whatever modest wealth they held.

This particular example measures around thirty metres in diameter, its enclosing bank composed partly of earth and partly of embedded stone, running to a width of 2.2 metres and rising about a metre on its exterior face. On the southern side the arrangement differs somewhat: a lower, narrower bank, only half a metre wide internally, is faced on its outer edge with a stone wall that rises to 1.8 metres, suggesting deliberate variation in construction technique or perhaps different phases of use and repair. Three breaks interrupt the circuit of the bank, the largest of them on the north-north-east at ten metres wide, with smaller gaps at the east-north-east and south-south-east. These openings may represent original entrances or later disturbances, and the widest is substantial enough to prompt questions about what passed through it. The level interior remains under pasture, its surface giving little away. Roughly a hundred metres to the north-east, a separate enclosure sits in the same landscape, suggesting that whoever occupied this ground was not entirely alone.