The house was built into the north-western quadrant of a ringfort, the circular earthen enclosures that were once the most common form of rural settlement across Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century. The result is one of those quietly dissonant arrangements that turns up occasionally in the Irish countryside, where the past has not so much been buried as absorbed into the ordinary business of daily life.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site clearly, showing it as a hachured circular enclosure with a diameter of around 35 metres. Hachuring was the cartographic convention used to indicate earthworks and raised ground, so the OS surveyors evidently found something substantial enough to mark with care. What survives today is an arc of earthen bank running from north-north-east to south-south-west, stretching roughly 33.5 metres and still standing to a height of about 1.1 metres. A rath, as this type of ringfort is sometimes called, would originally have consisted of one or more such banks with accompanying ditches, enclosing a farmstead and offering a degree of security for livestock and family alike. Here, the enclosure is only partially intact, with the north-western section lost to the footprint of the bungalow, but the surviving bank traces a clear arc across the west-facing slope, giving a real sense of the original circuit.