A rath, as these earthen enclosures are sometimes called, was typically a roughly circular bank-and-ditch construction used as a farmstead or enclosed settlement during early medieval Ireland. This one measured approximately thirty metres in diameter, but decades of field clearance and land reclamation have reduced it to almost nothing visible to the eye.

The 1920 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as already partially levelled at that point, its presence indicated by a curving line of hachures running from the south-east, through the west, and around to the north-west of the enclosure. When surveyors visited the site in April 1992, only a very faint scarp remained along the south-western sector. The rest had gone. What the land reclamation erased from the pasture, however, was not entirely erased from the record: the outline of the enclosure remains legible on aerial photography, that particular kind of ghostly persistence that disturbed ground often holds long after any physical trace has vanished at eye level.

The site sits on undulating pastureland on a north-east-facing slope, with Lough Rea visible to the north. There is little to see on the ground today, and that near-total absence is in some ways the most telling thing about it. Countless ringforts across Ireland have met the same fate quietly, their boundaries surviving only in maps, photographs taken from altitude, or the faint vocabulary of soil that reveals itself after rain.