The outer wall, nearly two metres tall and over a metre and a half wide at its eastern side, follows the line of something far more ancient without apparently acknowledging what it surrounds. Whether this was deliberate respect for the older structure or simply practical land management is not recorded anywhere.

The earlier monument is a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure typically associated with early medieval settlement and farmsteading, usually dating from somewhere between the sixth and twelfth centuries. This particular example sits on an east-facing slope amid undulating grassland, its form subcircular rather than a perfect ring, measuring just under fifty-five metres east to west and fifty-two metres north to south. The defining bank, overgrown now, survives from the eastern arc around through south and back up to the north, where a field wall cuts across the monument and breaks the sequence. North of that wall, no surface trace of the original enclosing bank remains visible at all. There is a gap on the east-south-east side that appears to be of modern origin rather than an original entrance, and faint traces of possible internal divisions can still be made out within the interior, suggesting the space may once have been subdivided for different uses, animal sheltering, storage, or domestic purposes.