A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed circular or oval farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by an earthen bank and an outer ditch; thousands of them once dotted the Irish countryside, and a great many have been quietly lost to ploughing, drainage, and shifting land use over the centuries. Here in County Westmeath, what remains is a curving bank running from east through south to northwest, describing a rough semicircle of roughly twenty metres across, with a wide, flat-bottomed external fosse, the defensive ditch that would originally have encircled the whole enclosure. The northern half is simply gone.

The monument sits on a south-south-east facing slope of a prominent rise in grassland, positioned to take in good views across the surrounding landscape, as early medieval farmers and their families tended to prefer. It appears on the 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map as an oval earthwork with its long axis running north to south, marked plainly as "fort". By the time the revised twenty-five inch Ordnance Survey edition was published in 1911, the northern half had already been levelled, most likely through agricultural improvement, and the map records what we still see today. A second ringfort lies approximately 350 metres to the northwest, suggesting this was once a moderately populated stretch of early medieval landscape rather than an isolated farmstead in open country.