A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and thousands of them once dotted the Irish countryside. This one, on a gentle north-facing slope about thirty metres south of a stream, has been levelled to the point where its outline is only really legible from the west, where a low rise in the land traces an arc roughly twenty-two metres north to south and twenty metres east to west.

The enclosure was clear enough in 1842 to be recorded on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it appeared as a hachured circle of approximately twenty metres diameter, hachuring being the cartographic convention used to indicate an earthen mound or bank. At some point after that survey, and probably well before the twentieth century, the bank was levelled, most likely to bring the interior into agricultural use. Local memory holds onto the name "fort", which is a common vernacular term for a ringfort in Ireland, and there is a detail that sharpens the picture considerably: potatoes were once planted inside it. That kind of cultivation would have been perfectly capable of reducing whatever remained of the earthwork, while the circular patch of ground, perhaps slightly better drained or differently textured than the surrounding field, continued to carry its old name even as it ceased to look the part.