It is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built and occupied mainly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands of them once dotted the Irish countryside, and enough survive to make them the most common field monument in the country, yet each one carries its own quiet particulars.

This example encloses a roughly circular interior about twenty-one metres across, bounded by a bank that is now considerably reduced and altered from its original form. The bank measures around four and a half metres wide, rising only about sixty centimetres on the interior side and a metre on the exterior, figures that suggest significant erosion or deliberate interference over the centuries. The fosse, the external ditch that would typically have been dug to provide material for the bank and to add a further line of enclosure, is no longer visible at ground level. The original entrance has also been lost, leaving the circuit without an obvious break or threshold. What remains is a faint but legible ring, the ghost of a boundary that once defined somebody's home ground.