A roughly circular earthwork platform, measuring around 37 metres north to south and 35 metres east to west, sits between two valleys in County Kilkenny, its banks and ditches still legible in the landscape despite the damage of recent decades. This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that once dotted the early medieval countryside in their thousands, typically home to a single farming family of middling status. What makes this one worth pausing over is not just what survives above ground, but what may lie beneath it.

The earthwork is defined by a sequence of concentric features: an inner bank, a flat-bottomed fosse (the ditch that runs around the outside of a bank), a second bank, and then a further fosse and outer bank beyond that. Having multiple banks and ditches is a mark of a more substantial or prestigious ringfort; simpler examples have only one of each. The measurements here are specific enough to be telling: the inner bank still stands 1.7 metres above the interior, giving a real sense of enclosure even in its worn state. Unfortunately, the outermost fosse and bank were largely removed during the 1980s, leaving only a short stretch in the north-east sector. Two possible original entrances survive, one at the south-east and one at the west, each around two metres wide. Inside, two hollows on the southern side may mark the roof of a collapsed souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically used for storage or refuge. The local historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, recorded that a passage leading westward from the fort had been discovered not many years before his time, lending the site a layer of history within its own history, a passageway already ancient when it was found, and now lost again.