The outer form is a ringfort, or rath, one of the thousands of roughly circular enclosures built across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically serving as farmsteads for a family and their livestock. What makes this particular example quietly peculiar is a small oval mound in its north-eastern interior, rising to about the same height as the enclosing bank itself. That mound is almost certainly not ancient. It appears to be the remnant of an Ordnance Survey trigonometrical station, a point used by nineteenth and early twentieth-century surveyors to fix precise elevations across the landscape, recorded at 408 feet on the 1911 edition of the OS six-inch map. Someone, in other words, used a prehistoric monument as a convenient high point from which to measure the country.

The rath itself is sub-circular in plan, measuring approximately 48 metres north to south and 57 metres east to west, enclosed by an earthen bank that still stands up to 1.5 metres in height, with a shallow fosse, or ditch, running along its outer edge. Both bank and fosse carry a few small disturbance gaps, the ordinary wear of centuries of farming around and occasionally through the monument. The interior slopes from east-north-east down to west-south-west, and faint cultivation ridges run across it in a north-west to south-east direction, suggesting the enclosed ground was worked at some point long after the fort's original use. A second ringfort lies roughly 50 metres to the south-east, which is not unusual; clusters of ringforts appear across Ireland, sometimes reflecting successive generations of the same landholding family occupying adjacent enclosures over time.