It is the kind of collision between ancient landscape and modern infrastructure that happens more often in Ireland than most people realise, but it is still quietly arresting to stand at the roadside and recognise that the low earthworks on either side of the tarmac once formed a single, continuous ring.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically used between roughly 500 and 1000 AD as a farmstead enclosed for the protection of livestock and family. This particular example sits on a gentle south-west facing slope in undulating pasture, its circular interior measuring around twenty metres across. The enclosing earthen bank is approximately 3.6 metres wide, though it survives to an internal height of only about 0.4 metres, indicating considerable erosion or deliberate levelling over the centuries. Outside the bank runs a fosse, a shallow external ditch, roughly 3.5 metres wide and now only about 0.1 metres deep, that would originally have reinforced the boundary and channelled rainwater away from the enclosed area. The road that bisects the site runs on a north-north-east to south-south-west axis, and the portion of the rath to the east of it has been partially levelled, leaving only low traces in the ground. The fosse remains more legible on the north-east to east arc and again from the south-east around to the south-west. A gap of about four metres in the bank on the north-east side may represent the original entrance through which the site's inhabitants once passed.