What they are describing is in fact a ringfort, or rath, the kind of enclosed farmstead that thousands of early medieval Irish families built and lived within. The name 'moat' suggests a vague, inherited memory of something raised and bounded, something that set itself apart from the surrounding land, even if the original meaning has long since blurred. That the memory persists at all is notable, because the physical monument itself is remarkably easy to miss.

The earthwork sits in level pasture roughly 175 metres east of the townland boundary with Boherroe. It appears on the 1897 edition of the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map as a suboval earthwork, already showing signs of truncation from a farm track cutting across its southern side. When archaeologists from the Archaeological Survey of Ireland examined it in 2008, they recorded a raised circular platform about 20 metres in diameter, defined by a scarp that survives best along the southwestern, western, northern, and northeastern arcs, where it reaches nearly a metre in height and almost four metres in width. Towards the northeast and around to the south-southeast, the scarp has been considerably reduced, standing only about 20 centimetres above ground level. A possible entrance, roughly six metres wide overall, may have existed at the northwest. The farm track running east to west has cut more than a metre and a half into the hillslope across the southern sector, and field boundaries now press in on all sides. The interior is level and grass-covered.

That combination of encroaching field boundaries and low surviving earthwork height means the rath is effectively invisible from aerial imagery; it does not register on Ordnance Survey Ireland orthoimages, Digital Globe imagery, or Google Earth captures taken as recently as 2018. On the ground the situation is more legible, though the monument sits within a small enclosed field and requires some attention to read. The best-preserved section of the scarp runs from the southwest through west to north, and this is where the original form of the enclosure, a bank defining a domestic space that would once have contained timber structures and animal pens, remains most intelligible. A sketch plan and cross-section drawn by the ASI in 2008 offer the clearest picture of what survives.