A near-perfect circle, measuring 48 metres across in both directions, it is the kind of feature that catches the eye once you know what you are looking at, though generations of farmers have simply grazed cattle around it and moved on.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built and occupied predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, and this one in Dromerk is a reasonably well-defined example. An earthen bank, still standing to a height of 2.4 metres, forms the enclosure, with an external fosse, a defensive ditch, running around the outside at a depth of 0.8 metres. The entrance gap on the eastern side is 6 metres wide and retains a causeway crossing the fosse, the original approach to whoever once lived within. Inside the enclosure, two small grass-covered mounds sit near the centre. Their origins are uncertain; they may be field clearance cairns, meaning piles of stone gathered from surrounding land and heaped up over time by people working the soil rather than any deliberate monument or burial feature.