A rath, as these earthwork enclosures are also known, was typically a roughly circular raised bank of earth and sometimes stone, enclosing a farmstead in early medieval Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across the country in various states of repair. This one does not survive at all. It has been levelled, and the pasture that now covers the south-south-west-facing slope gives no visible indication that anything ever stood there.

What makes the site worth noting is how clearly it was recorded before it disappeared. The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842 shows it as a hachured oval enclosure, the standard cartographic shorthand surveyors used to indicate an earthwork feature. The measurements it suggests are modest but legible: roughly thirty metres east to west and twenty-five metres north to south. That map, produced during a period of intensive and meticulous surveying of the Irish landscape, caught the rath at a point when it was still recognisable on the ground. Sometime between that survey and the present, agricultural activity removed what remained of the bank, leaving the 1842 map sheet as the most detailed record of its form.