The circular enclosure on a north-east-facing slope in undulating pastureland looks, at first glance, like a classic Irish rath, the type of raised, embanked farmstead built in early medieval times and found in their thousands across the island. But something is off. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in the mid-nineteenth century, shows no trace of it at all.

That absence is telling. Because the feature does not appear on the first edition OS map but does appear on later cartographic records, it is thought to date from somewhere between 1840 and 1903, placing its likely construction well outside the early medieval period when most ringforts were built. The prevailing theory is that it may have been a tree-ring, a deliberately planted circular grove of trees used as shelter for livestock or as an ornamental feature on agricultural land, a practice that occasionally produced earthwork boundaries resembling ancient enclosures. The raised circular area measures roughly 54.9 metres in diameter north to south, defined by a bank that has been worn down to a scarp roughly 0.8 metres high, a fosse (that is, a surrounding ditch) four metres wide and 1.1 metres deep, and an outer bank about three metres wide and 1.37 metres high on its exterior face. A gap with a causeway just under three metres wide runs through the outer bank in the south-west quadrant, though this opening may be a modern addition. Some quarrying has also disturbed the northern portion of the site. Immediately to the south-east sits a separate, smaller circular enclosure, its relationship to the main feature unexplained.