This is a rath, the most common type of early medieval enclosure in Ireland, typically built between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries to define the farmstead of a free landowner. What makes this one quietly interesting is the degree to which the landscape has absorbed it. The bank on its eastern side has been pressed into service as an ordinary field boundary, folded so naturally into the working farm that it is easy to miss the older geometry underneath.

The enclosure is roughly circular, measuring twenty metres from north to south and twenty-one and a half metres from east to west, which puts it at the smaller end of the rath scale. Its earthen bank still stands to a height of just under a metre in places, though gaps have opened to the north-east and south-east. A rath of this size would likely have enclosed a single family's living and working space, with the bank, sometimes accompanied by an external ditch, serving as a boundary marker and a modest barrier against livestock straying or predators entering. The bank here is earthen rather than stone, which is typical of lowland Cork, where soil was more workable than the rocky ground further west.