A rath, to use the Irish term, is a circular or roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically raised by early medieval farming communities as a defended homestead, and thousands of them survive across Ireland in various states of preservation. This one does not. No bank, no ditch, no rise in the ground betrays what was once a substantial enclosure sitting in the low-lying fields here.

The paper record tells a more interesting story than the land does. The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site as a subcircular enclosure, measuring roughly 42 metres east to west and 33 metres north to south, already partially compromised by field boundaries cutting into it from the north, east, and south. By the time the more detailed 1:2500 Ordnance Survey plan was drawn up between 1912 and 1916, the shape recorded had shifted noticeably, described now as subtriangular, approximately 43 metres northeast to southwest and 29 metres northwest to southeast. Whether that change reflects actual further deterioration of the earthwork, differences in surveying method, or simply the encroachment of those same field boundaries is difficult to say. What is also noted, and tantalising in its brevity, is that a cave was associated with the site. Caves or souterrains, the latter being stone-lined underground passages built as storage or refuge spaces, were commonly attached to ringforts during the early medieval period, and the reference here suggests this enclosure once had something more to it than a simple earthen bank.