The plantation, covering both the bank and the interior, gives the site an oddly deliberate look from a distance, as if someone had decided to ring-fence a small wood rather than a field. What lies beneath that green crown, however, is a ringfort, or rath, an early medieval farmstead enclosure of the kind that once dotted the Irish countryside in enormous numbers.

Ringforts were the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They were not military forts in any serious sense but enclosed farmsteads, the bank and ditch serving to define a household's territory and keep livestock in or out. This one sits on a south-west-facing slope, a deliberately chosen aspect that would have offered shelter from prevailing winds and reasonable drainage. The circular enclosure measures approximately 42 metres in diameter, enclosed by a low bank of earth and stone rising to about one metre. That modest height is not unusual; many raths have been worn down by centuries of grazing and weather, and the fact that this one survives at all, even in reduced form, is partly a matter of luck and partly the protection inadvertently provided by the conifer planting.