The ringfort, known in Irish as a rath, is a type of enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches that surrounded a domestic settlement. Here, the enclosing element is a fosse, a shallow ditch cut into the ground, and it is that fosse rather than any upstanding bank that now carries most of the surviving evidence of the site's original form.

Ordnance Survey maps from 1842 and 1905 both record a hachured circular enclosure, the hachuring being a cartographic convention for indicating a raised or depressed boundary feature. By 1936, the OS map was showing the enclosure with an internal diameter of approximately twenty metres, still circular, still defined by its fosse, and still being cut by the road to the west. What those successive maps record, in other words, is not a site gradually deteriorating but one that had already been substantially levelled by the time systematic mapping began, with the road truncation a fixed feature across nearly a century of surveying. Today, the surviving earthwork is a subcircular area measuring around thirty-six metres north to south, enclosed by a fosse that is roughly two metres wide and only about twenty centimetres deep. That fosse is most legible along the northern to eastern arc and from the east-southeast around to the southeast, where the ground has been least disturbed. The site sits in pasture on a south-facing slope, which would have made it a practical as well as a defensible choice for an early medieval farming household.