The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, one of tens of thousands of such earthworks scattered across the country, most of them dating to the early medieval period. They were typically used as enclosed farmsteads, defined by a raised bank and an outer ditch. What makes this one linger in the mind is not its scale but its afterlife in local memory, the sense that long after its original inhabitants were gone, people were still making use of it, in the most sorrowful way possible.

The rath sits on a slight rise, a modest but deliberate piece of positioning that would have given its original occupants a degree of visibility and drainage. It measures roughly 30.5 metres east to west and 33.4 metres north to south, making it a fairly typical example of its type. The enclosing earthen bank survives best along the south-east to west arc, where it still stands to an external height of around 0.9 metres, though elsewhere it has been reduced to little more than a scarp, a low eroded slope of earth. Outside the bank runs a fosse, the term for the ditch that was dug to supply material for the bank and to reinforce the enclosure. Here it survives as a shallow depression, two to two and a half metres wide, most legible along the southern arc where a growth of rushes traces its curve. A lower section of the scarp at the north-east may mark where the original entrance once stood. Inside, the ground is level apart from a slight dip to the north, and faint cultivation ridges run across the interior on a north-east to south-west axis, evidence of later agricultural use by people who were themselves long gone before anyone thought to record the place.

The surrounding landscape has gradually reorganised itself around the rath rather than removing it. Field walls cut across the northern half of the interior, skirt the outer edge of the fosse to the south-west, and run just outside the eastern edge. A stream lies 80 metres to the east, its north to south course forming the townland boundary. Another enclosure sits 90 metres to the south. The rath endures, altered and encroached upon, its earthworks softened by centuries of weather and grazing, yet still legible in the ground.