A rath, as these earthwork enclosures are known, was typically a circular bank-and-ditch construction used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or defended homestead, most dating from roughly 500 to 1000 AD. This one sits on a south-east facing slope, about fifty metres from a southward-flowing stream, a position that would once have offered both shelter and a reliable water source. What makes it quietly arresting now is precisely how much of it has gone.

When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map was drawn up in the nineteenth century, the site was recorded as a complete circular enclosure. By the time J. Cuppage surveyed it for the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, the southern half had been almost completely destroyed. What remains is a univallate rath, meaning it had a single enclosing bank rather than the multiple concentric rings found at higher-status sites. The surviving arc of bank reaches a maximum of 1.25 metres high on its outer face and around a metre on the inner, with a width of approximately two metres. The only trace of the lost southern portion is a barely perceptible rise where the interior ground level meets what was once a substantial earthwork. There is also a gap of 3.5 metres in the north-east section, which may mark the original entrance, a common position for rath entrances across Ireland.

The site sits in a landscape already dense with early medieval and prehistoric remains. The Dingle Peninsula, known in Irish as Corca Dhuibhne, holds one of the highest concentrations of archaeological monuments in the country, from ogham stones to beehive huts. This particular rath is now more absence than presence, a place where the archaeology has to be read in faint gradients of turf rather than in standing stonework, which gives it a rather different quality from the better-preserved examples nearby.