Whoever chose the site knew what they were doing. The views open out to the north-east, east, south, and west, and Lough Derravaragh, one of the larger lakes in the Irish midlands and the lake associated in mythology with the Children of Lir, sits less than five hundred metres to the south-west. A second ringfort lies roughly the same distance to the north-east, suggesting this was once a settled, organised landscape rather than an isolated farmstead.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is the most common type of early medieval monument in Ireland, typically the enclosed homestead of a farming family, bounded by one or more earthen banks and a fosse, which is a shallow ditch dug on the outer side of the bank. This example is oval in plan, measuring approximately nineteen metres north to south and twenty-two metres east to west, dimensions consistent with a single-family enclosure. The earthen bank survives in good condition, which is not always the case in agricultural land, though it carries several gaps where the material has been disturbed or worn through. A slight fosse is still traceable. There are also traces of what may be an outer bank, though this could be a more recent addition to the landscape rather than an original feature of the monument.