A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular earthwork enclosure typical of early medieval Ireland, usually built to define and defend a farmstead. This one was oval rather than circular, measuring approximately 74 metres along its longer axis, and it sat on a south-south-west-facing slope with the two loughs visible on either side. By 1970 it had been completely obliterated, its banks broken up by later field construction and quarrying until no perimeter could be traced with any confidence on the ground. What survives from above, however, is another matter: on aerial photography the vanished enclosure reappears as a large oval cropmark, a difference in vegetation growth revealing the buried disturbance underneath. The site is, in its own quiet way, more legible from the sky than from the earth.

The 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the earthwork clearly, and the revised 1913 edition still showed it, though already modified. Within the interior, there is also the trace of a long rectangular house site, a separate monument in its own right. The most curious element of the site's story, though, involves a stone. Local tradition long held that an ogham stone, one of the carved early medieval markers that use a system of notches along a central line to record names and dedications, stood beside the fort on the 400-foot ridge overlooking the north-east shore of Lough Drin. Investigation proved the tradition misleading in its specifics. The stone exists, but it is not an ogham stone. Known locally as "Crow's Feet" for the markings incised into its hard Silurian shale surface, it was moved to beneath a large oak tree when the fort was levelled, and it continues to be held in high regard by the community. The markings turn out to be an Ordnance Survey datum point, the kind of benchmark cut by sappers to establish precise height measurements during early surveying work. The reverence that attached itself to the ogham tradition simply transferred, apparently, to a surveyor's chisel-mark on ancient stone.