It is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, one of the thousands of roughly circular enclosures built across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically between the sixth and tenth centuries, and used as enclosed farmsteads or places of status. This particular example is subcircular in plan, measuring roughly 45 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and 40 metres from northwest to southeast, and it is defined by two banks with a fosse, an earthen or rock-cut ditch, running between them.

The monument is poorly preserved. A field bank, likely constructed at some later agricultural date, cuts through it at the east-southeast and southwest, disrupting the original circuit, and to the south of this intrusion it is an inner scarp rather than a proper bank that now does the work of enclosing the space. The site was noted by Neary as far back as 1914, suggesting it has been recognised in the local record for well over a century, and it sits approximately 300 metres east of a second ringfort in the same area, the two forming a loose pairing of the kind not unusual in parts of Connacht, where suitable elevated ground attracted repeated settlement. The local name Hill Fort, though not technically accurate in an archaeological sense, a hill fort being a distinct and generally much larger Iron Age monument, reflects the way communities often preserved memory of a place's significance even when the specifics had blurred over generations.