It is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across Ireland in various states of preservation, but this one has an additional wrinkle: at some point a field boundary was driven straight through its western side, shearing off what would once have been a curved bank and giving the whole thing a flat, almost architectural edge it was never intended to have.

The rath appears on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as an oval embanked enclosure, already bordered on the west by a field boundary, which suggests the truncation was well underway by the time cartographers recorded it. Today the surviving form is roughly D-shaped, measuring about 22 metres on its longer axis, and is defined by an earthen scarp, essentially a sloping drop in ground level that traces the original enclosure. On the curving eastern side the scarp rises to around 1.6 metres; on the straight western side, where the field boundary absorbed and cut into the rath, it is a much sharper, near-vertical face of about 0.9 metres. At the south and south-south-west, the scarp all but disappears, dropping almost flush with the surrounding ground. This low point sits along the spine of the ridge and is thought to mark the location of the original entrance, a detail consistent with the way many raths were positioned to take advantage of natural gradients. The platform itself is grass-covered, with a scatter of small blackthorn bushes around its edges, and the rise it sits on gives open views to the north across the Mayo landscape.