This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. Tens of thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying degrees of preservation, and this one is no exception to the general pattern of slow attrition.

The enclosure measures sixteen metres in diameter, defined partly by an eroded earthen bank and partly by a natural scarp on its eastern and south-eastern side. The bank itself is modest, rising only about half a metre above the surrounding ground on the exterior, and the northern stretch of it appears to have been levelled at some point relatively recently, a loss that is not unusual given the pressures of agricultural improvement over the past century and more. What makes the internal layout worth noting is its deliberate engineering: the southern portion of the interior is raised, while the northern portion has been cut back into the hillside, a practical solution to the problem of building a level living space on sloping ground. Two large stones remain in the western sector of the interior, their original function unrecorded. By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1846, the enclosure was already showing as a circular feature of approximately twenty metres in diameter, slightly larger than current measurements suggest, which hints at how much material has been lost to erosion and disturbance in the intervening years.