It measures roughly 42 metres east to west and 37 metres north to south, and what makes it immediately strange is not its size but its asymmetry: along the north-west to north and south-east to south stretches, the enclosing bank simply disappears, replaced instead by a scarped edge, a deliberate cutting of the natural slope to form a vertical or near-vertical face. The result is a structure that shifts its defensive logic depending on which direction you approach from, combining built earthwork with shaped ground in a way that feels oddly provisional, as though the builders were negotiating with the terrain rather than imposing on it.

This is a rath, one of the thousands of ringforts scattered across Ireland, which were the dominant settlement form during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Typically a circular or oval enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, a rath served as a farmstead for a family of some local standing, the bank and fosse providing a degree of security for livestock as much as for people. Here the fosse, the external ditch, is still traceable at around 5.3 metres wide and 0.75 metres deep, though it has been partially filled in where a trackway cuts across it and skirts the northern edge of the site. The bank itself survives to an external height of 2.7 metres in places, a considerable presence even after centuries of weathering, with an internal face rising only 0.6 metres above the enclosed interior. The original entrance has not been identified. In the south-west quadrant of the interior, the remains of a souterrain survive: an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, a feature found in many Irish ringforts and thought to have served for storage, refuge, or both.