This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the kind of enclosed settlement that farmers and their families occupied across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period onward. Thousands survive in various states across the country, but what makes this one worth pausing over is the visible story of its slow dismemberment, and the fragments that still hold their ground.

The enclosure measures approximately 38 metres across, defined by an earthen bank that still reaches 1.8 metres in height on its interior face along the southern to south-eastern arc. Beyond the bank runs an external fosse, a defensive ditch, which survives to a depth of around 1.2 metres in places. When Bowman recorded it in 1934, he described what he could still see as a double-ramparted fort of about 35 yards in diameter, situated in land belonging to a Mrs O'Connor. Even then, the damage was already considerable: roughly half the outer rampart had been levelled, along with about 12 yards of the inner one. The Ordnance Survey maps of 1904 and 1938 both show a field boundary running alongside the fosse from the north around to the east-south-east, a boundary that is still visible on the ground and has incidentally helped preserve the ditch along its eastern edge. Elsewhere the fosse has fared less well: it is shallow to the south-south-west, waterlogged towards the north-west, and at the northern end it has been infilled entirely, with a silage pit and agricultural shed built immediately beyond it, pressing right up against what remains.