It is all that remains of an oval ringfort, a type of enclosed early medieval settlement defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, that once sat complete on a glacial knoll above the surrounding pasture. The eastern half was destroyed by motorway construction. What makes the loss particularly pointed is what excavation revealed before the machines arrived: this was not a simple farmstead enclosed and abandoned, but a site that accumulated centuries of activity, human burial included, within the same modest circuit of bank and ditch.

In 1990, ahead of the Mullingar By-pass construction, archaeologist V. J. Keeley began excavating the eastern half of the monument. The oval earthwork measured roughly 52 metres in length and 46 metres in width, and sat atop a natural glacial knoll. The bank, composed of boulder clay mixed with charcoal and fragmentary animal bone, reached a maximum height of 2 metres on the western side. It was enclosed by an outer ditch up to 1.8 metres deep and 2 metres wide. A second, interior ditch, added in a later phase, cut into the bank in places and ran inside it in others, suggesting the site was modified and reused over time. Near the northern bank, excavators uncovered a metalworking area: a bowl furnace and associated pits, along with crucible fragments, iron slag, iron knives, an iron leather scorer, pin fragments, a bronze ring, a bronze bracelet, and quantities of vitreous material, the glassy residue of high-temperature metalworking. A second season in April and May 1991 completed the excavation of the eastern half and extended work across a significant portion of the remainder. By the end, fourteen burials had been recorded. Most were formal extended inhumations, meaning the body was laid flat and at length, aligned east-west with the head at west, several outlined by stones. But two burials departed from this pattern. One was a young adult female deposited in a shallow pit too small to contain her fully, her knees flexed and her head turned to the side. Another adult female had been placed face downward in her grave. A child's remains were found in the inner ditch, lying across it, with skeletal analysis suggesting the body may have fallen or been thrown in. Two children were found buried simultaneously, lying facing each other with their skulls touching.

Today the surviving western arc is visible from aerial photography as a shrub-lined curve, bisected on its eastern side by the road infrastructure it was excavated to accommodate. The finds, the furnace, the atypical burials, the animal skulls recovered complete from the ditch fill, point to a site whose full biography remains only partially legible, the more informative half having been removed to make way for the bypass.