It is, in fact, a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of archaeological monument in Ireland. Thousands of these enclosures were built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and they served primarily as defended farmsteads for extended family groups. What makes each one worth attention is the particular way the landscape has preserved or obscured it over the centuries, and here, the story is written clearly enough in the ground.

The monument measures approximately 45 metres in diameter and is defined by an earthen bank with an external fosse, which is the ditch dug to create the material for the bank itself. The combination of raised bank and sunken ditch would have made the enclosure a reasonably formidable boundary, marking territory as much as providing defence. A scarp, a natural or man-made slope rather than a constructed bank, runs along the northern to north-north-eastern arc of the site, adding an additional defining edge on that side. A gap at the east-south-east may represent the original entrance, the point through which livestock and people would have passed daily, though this is not certain. More recent activity has left its mark too: a field wall cuts across the enclosing elements at both the north-east and south-west, a reminder that later agricultural generations had little hesitation in incorporating older earthworks into their own land divisions.