It is, in fact, the probable remains of a pair of conjoined ringforts, the earthwork enclosures of early medieval Ireland, and the site has been identified by researchers as the assembly place of the Óenach Cairbre. An óenach was a periodic gathering, part fair, part legal assembly, part ritual occasion, comparable in social function to the great assemblies held at Tara or Rathcroghan. That this one has survived at all, even in mutilated form, beneath hawthorn and quarrying damage, makes it quietly remarkable.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp surveyed the site in the early twentieth century and described the enclosures in careful detail, noting their figure-of-eight plan, flat-topped banks rising up to around 1.8 metres above the surrounding field, and a fosse, or ditch, traceable all round, up to 5.5 metres wide in places. Writing in 1920, he placed the Óenach Cairbre landscape in the same category as Tara, Brugh na Bóinne, and Rathcroghan, recognising the characteristic combination of assembly place, cemetery, old roads, and water crossing that marks such complexes. The ford just to the south, now associated with Abbey Bridge, was already ancient by Westropp's reckoning; he records it as the crossing known as the Ford of the Chariots of Fergus. An ancient hollow way, worn between 1.2 and 1.5 metres into the ground, connects the enclosures to this ford, and a smaller associated enclosure lies about 75 metres to the south-west along the same route. Across the river, 240 metres to the south, stand the ruins of Monaster Abbey. Begley, writing in 1906, had referred to the site as Aenach Cairpre, the fair of the territory of Cairbre, also known in older sources as Aenach Cloghur. A possible burial mound known as Síd Asail, a síd being a mound associated in Irish tradition with the otherworld, lies 1.1 kilometres to the north-west, reinforcing the sense of a deliberately composed ritual landscape.

The enclosures are visible on aerial imagery as a roughly oval tree-covered area measuring approximately 90 metres east to west and 60 metres north to south. An OPW field report from 1978 noted dense scrub and significant damage from quarrying, and that condition is unlikely to have improved. The monument sits in private farmland, so access requires consideration, and the vegetation makes close inspection difficult in any season. The 1897 Ordnance Survey 25-inch map gives perhaps the clearest historical picture of the enclosure's outline, and Westropp's published sketch plans remain the most detailed record of what the earthworks looked like before further deterioration.