A rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, was typically a circular earthen enclosure used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. This one, roughly forty metres across in both its principal axes, has been levelled to the point where only a low rise in the ground traces where the bank once ran.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a subcircular enclosure, which tells us that even by the mid-nineteenth century it was a known feature of the landscape, already hemmed in on its southern side by an east-west field boundary. That boundary did more than constrain the site; it eventually truncated it, cutting across the southern arc of what had been a complete circle. A cropmark photograph held in the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography confirms this truncation, showing the surviving portion of the enclosure clearly while the southern segment disappears beneath the modern field line. It is a pattern repeated across Cork and indeed the wider Irish countryside, where agricultural reorganisation over centuries steadily encroached on, and eventually consumed, earthworks that had stood for a thousand years or more.