A rath, as this type of enclosure is commonly known, was typically a circular earthwork enclosing a farmstead, defined by one or more banks and ditches, and constructed mostly during the first millennium AD. This particular example sits on a prominent natural elevation with steeply sloping ground to the north-north-west and east, and looks out over a flat, damp expanse below. It is the kind of site that rewards close attention, because from a distance there is almost nothing to see.

The enclosure was already well defined when the Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1838, appearing as a circular embanked enclosure on the six-inch sheet. By the time the same area was mapped again in 1920, the record showed a subcircular hachured enclosure of roughly thirty metres in diameter, with an arc of external fosse, a ditch running around part of the northern edge, and field boundaries already beginning to cut across its form. At some point after that, the rath was largely levelled. What survives today is fragmentary but real. The outline of the enclosure can still be read from the north-west to the south as a band of rough ground and differential vegetation, where the natural contour of the hill preserves the ghost of the original shape. To the south-west of a field fence that cuts across the site, a section of the original enclosing bank survives as a low scarp, around three and a half metres wide, rising about a metre on its exterior face and barely ten centimetres on the interior. It follows a shallow arc from south to west, now covered in gorse, brambles, and ferns.