These circular enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the farmsteads of wealthy farming families during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They were defined by one or more earthen banks thrown up around a central living area, serving as much as a marker of status as a practical enclosure. Here, the bank has been reduced over centuries to little more than a slight swelling in the ground, tracing a circle of roughly 35 metres in diameter.

What makes this particular rath quietly interesting is not its condition but the way later human activity has written itself across it. A townland boundary wall, the kind of dry-stone division that parcels up the Irish countryside into its familiar patchwork, runs straight through the site from roughly east to west. The boundary it marks almost certainly predates the wall itself by a considerable time, but the physical construction cuts cleanly across the earlier monument, one era of land division imposed directly upon another. The rath, already worn down, was further fragmented by a wall that had no particular reason to go around it, because by then it was simply a gentle rise in a field.